“Translation is something we do all the time in everyday life,” I am assured as I contemplate Sandra Smith’s impressive record of translation and academic accomplishment. Smith, who is a Fellow of Robinson College, has translated eight of wartime author Irène Némirovsky’s novels since 2005 and plans to complete a further three translations by 2012. Her critically acclaimed translations have brought Némirovsky’s work to a new audience, and have inducted the novel Suite Française – begun during the Nazi occupation of France – into the canon of indispensable European wartime literature.

Suite Française was “not expected to be a big hit,” Smith admits. “I woke up, Radio Four came on and I heard a discussion about Suite Française and thought, ‘This is a sign,’” she says. She rang publishing house Chatto and Windus, which was looking to publish the Némirovsky translation, and was sent to a translating “beauty contest”, which saw Smith come away with the Suite Française commission. “It was a bit of a fluke,” she laughs, “but really you make your own luck – I made the effort.” Smith says that Némirovsky, who believed she was “writing for posterity,” had envisaged Suite Française as a French War and Peace, writing about “the things important in 50 years as well as five years”. However, her work was cut short by her tragic death at Auschwitz in 1942. “She wrote about day to day life – that’s why it’s so universal,” Smith argues. “It’s not fiction – Irène knew every single person in the book,” she says.

On the place of languages in a wider educational context, Smith is adamant that the decline in foreign language teaching is “going to backfire...the Government’s got this ‘let them speak English’ attitude to languages,” she laments, comparing the English experience to other European countries where students regularly learn two or three extra languages at school. “If it isn’t required by the Government or universities, people won’t do it.”

That Cambridge no longer requires a foreign language qualification from applicants is also a point of contention for Smith, who tells me, “Cambridge should be leading in foreign languages, not going along with badly thought-out decisions.” In an increasingly globalised world, languages are “essential”, and the role of the translator has greatly changed from “a literal job to a creative art”.

Sandra Smith is a champion of the cause of modern language teaching in Cambridge. Her high-impact Némirovsky translations have introduced the world to one of World War II’s most powerful French voices. Némirovsky’s daughter Denise said that her mother “died a citizen of the world”; thanks to Smith’s work, Némirovsky is now also an “author of the world” – not so much lost as rediscovered in translation.