The following obituary was published by the Independent on 5 November 2011. It was written by Amanda Hopkinson.

Ewald Osers: Poet, translator and stalwart of the World Service

Ewald Osers was primarily a translator from the Czech and German into English

"Ewald epitomised the translator," his fellow translator Ros Schwartz recalled. "Boundless intellectual curiosity, acquiring new languages as easily as catching a cold. He embraced new languages and was at his desk until the very end of his extraordinarily productive life".

A naturally talented linguist, he rapidly acquired further languages to add to those of his childhood. Though he was born in Prague his first language, and that of his education, was German. Typically for then, his mother was Austrian and his father (who died when Ewald was six) apparently "spoke Czech badly". Both were non-practising Jews.

Ewald brought the rigour of a scientific training to bear on his acquisition of a half-dozen Slavonic languages as well as French and Italian, all largely self-taught from grammatical first principles. English was acquired of necessity when anti-semitism led to his move to London in 1938.

Most of his translations were from German into English and incorporated textbooks (including Physics for You and Me and Fun with Physics); history (Merchants make History; Hitler's War on Russia) and geography (two dozen books on everywhere from the Aegean to the Sahara); literature – poems by Rudolf Langer, Ondra Lysohorsky and Reiner Kunze, among others – and Armenian love poetry and Chinese folk tales; art books (including two on Klimt); biographies of Einstein and Heidegger; and "most importantly", the correspondence between Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He also translated from the Czech, Slovak, Bulgarian, Macedonian and Armenian, and rendered volumes of poetry by Gavin Ewart, Seamus Heaney and Wendy Cope from English into Czech.

Osers' autobiography, Snows of Yesteryear – a Translator's Story, appeared in 2007. Its opening paragraph takes 13 lines to list the extent of the Austro-Hungarian empire into which he was born and whose languages he was to pursue. From Stepanska gymnasium he studied chemistry at the German University, and also started translating Czech poetry, joining a left-wing literary group called Blok. He published both translations and his own verses in the radical quarterly U but in 1938 moved to London. He would not see his homeland again for 27 years; he met his mother for the last time in spring 1939.

At the outbreak of war he joined the BBC Monitoring Service. In 1940, he enrolled at UCL to study Russian and extend his coverage for the BBC. Russian, however, was not a language he chose to translate, much as he enjoyed working in different sections of the World Service until his retirement in 1977. The Central European community he found at Bush House was mirrored in his social circle. He was married in 1942 to a classically English woman, Mary Harman. In London, and then when the family moved to near Reading, he gravitated between the host community and what his daughter, Margaret, described as "that community of refugees who circulated between Caversham, London and Reading". They – and the local delicatessen, called Schmidt's – were the mainstay of many parties in the 1950s.

At the publication of his autobiography, Osers announced: "I have no intention of stopping working. I enjoy literary translation. I enjoy the intellectual, artistic and linguistic challenge. No other activity, and certainly not leisure, would give me the same satisfaction. It would be nice to bring the total of my published books up to the round figure of 160: but time will tell".

He was not far off. His final (incomplete) work was a collection of what he called his "medallions": part-way between an aphorism and memoir, each of the 50 or so inserts recounted a short memory, such as that of his first university examination, when he was shocked to see two young nuns hoik up their overskirts and extract some bits of paper from their waistbands to copy.

Increasingly in his latter years, Osers acquired prizes and admirers, including the European Poetry Translation Prize in 1987. He held more Royal Fellowships and lay Orders of Merit than perhaps even he could count. As he gave more time to the Arts Council and the Translators' Association, so he became unofficial mentor to a rising generation.

Ewald Osers, poet, author and translator: born Prague 13 May 1917; married 1942 Mary Harman (died 2011; one daughter, one son); died Reading 11 October 2011.
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The following obituary by the poet Alan Brownjohn appeared in the Guardian on 28 November 2011:

Ewald Osers enjoyed tellling friends he was one of the last surviving subjects of the Habsburg monarchy.

In his late years, Ewald Osers, who has died aged 94, enjoyed telling friends that he was one of the last surviving subjects of the Habsburg monarchy, in the shape of the Emperor Charles I. Born in Prague 18 months before the end of the first world war and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he became, on 11 November 1918, as he wrote in his 2007 autobiography Snows of Yesteryear, one of the youngest citizens of the new Czechoslovak Republic – "without any legal proceedings and without any filling of forms".

He was to change nationality once again, taking British citizenship in 1941; and go on acquiring ample experience of moving comfortably from one tongue and culture to another as a talented poet, lecturer and, above all, translator extraordinary, of more than 150 books from around a dozen languages.

His Jewish parents – his father, a bank manager, died in 1923; his mother in Auschwitz in 1942 – were both German speakers from the professional upper-middle class, but enough Czech was spoken, mainly with family servants at home or with children in the park, for him to recall a "bilingual atmosphere" during his early childhood.

This, and subsequently a precocious eagerness to learn any language (including English) for which lessons were available, in school or privately, was crucial for Osers when, in September 1938, he gave up his studies – in chemistry and physics – at the German University in Prague, where Nazi students had been making life unpleasant for him, and came to London.

After a spell at University College, where he met May Harman (whom he would marry in 1942), he abandoned science altogether when war was declared a year later, and was recruited by the BBC to work in its top-secret Monitoring Service at Evesham, Worcestershire (later based at Caversham Park, near Reading). There he was one of a team containing emigre intellectuals such as George Weidenfeld and Ernst Gombrich, and became a valued specialist listener to both German and Czech broadcasts. In this period he also managed to acquire Russian to degree level through tuition by Russian colleagues bored by their own work. He was to remain with the BBC for nearly 40 years.

The young Osers had been active in literary life in prewar Prague, writing poetry and translating, and knew prominent literary figures – Stephen Spender, John Lehmann and others – in London during the war. A selection of modern Czech poetry in his translations was published in 1945, and he began on a steady, wide-ranging series of prose fiction and non-fiction translations.

A considerable breakthrough came in 1961 with A Working Friendship, a translation with Hanns Hammelmann of the correspondence between Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal; this was reviewed favourably by WH Auden in the Times Literary Supplement and Osers considered it his most important book. He felt proud to receive in 1971 the Schlegel-Tieck prize from the Society of Authors for the best translation from German, the book being the second volume of Paul Carell's Scorched Earth, a history of Hitler's 1943-44 campaign in Russia.

Although his work as a reliable translator of almost any work of Central European political, social or literary interest continued apace – for one publisher alone, Harraps, he produced 17 books – the next 20 years (especially after he retired from the BBC in 1977) gave him more time and opportunity to pursue the activity he loved most: translating poetry. This he did mainly for enterprising smaller firms such as Neil Astley's Bloodaxe, Alan Ross's London Magazine Editions and Anthony Rudolf's Menard Press: work by Reiner Kunze, Rose Auslander and Rudolf Langer from the German; and by the Nobel prizewinner Jaroslav Seifert and Miroslav Holub from the Czech.

Forest Books, the feisty translation imprint founded by Brenda Walker, enlisted him to bring the Bulgarian poet Lyubomir Levchev and the Macedonian Mateja Matevski to English readers. But his most notable achievement came when a more commercial house, Andre Deutsch, produced a lavish Selected Poetry of Jaroslav Seifert (1986). This won the Poetry Society's prestigious European poetry translation prize.

Osers was a genial, humorous man, loved and revered by writer friends. He wore his achievements lightly. Translation was not something about which it was necessary to agonise, let alone theorise: "I don't believe that translation theory has ever helped me to translate."

About translating poetry, which he managed with something approaching genius, the most he could suggest in Snows of Yesteryear was that it was a natural aptitude he could not define: "Without conscious effort a translated line … would stand ready in my mind." He was three times chairman of the Translators Association, a vice-president of the International Federation of Translators and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; there were numerous awards from countries whose literature he translated.

His wife died in February this year. He is survived by their son and daughter.

• Ewald Osers, translator and poet, born 13 May 1917; died 10 October 2011