1. Introduction In the present postmodern world, so many of the biased remarks heard about one nationality or another can be traced to a failure to appreciate the different conventions of politeness and courtesy in different societies; therefore, it can be referred to as an instance of cross-cultural pragmatic failure (Mirza Suzani & Armiun, 2011). Furthermore, while a set of underlying social and linguistic conventions are assumed to exist universally in all cultures, contrastive pragmatic analysis needs two kinds of categories to contrast: one linguistic and the other sociological (Mirza Suzani, 2006). In the same vein, despite the idea that the formulaic nature of compliments-their syntactic and lexical predictability-makes them attractive materials, probing compliments in translation can be a troublesome aspect for language learners from different cultural backgrounds (Mirza Suzani & Armiun, 2011). Hence, the study of the speech act of compliments in both source and target languages can be important because paying appropriate compliments and identifying them in each culture is an aspect of communicative competence which may differ in a variety of ways from one culture to another. Moreover, compliments are more often than not culture-specific and reflect fundamental values of the society and the accurate interpretation of illocutionary force of compliments involves knowledge of subtle cultural norms of both source and target languages. Having considered the above points, the present research aims to investigate speech act of compliments in Persian, English and French from a sociocultural perspective...