Douglas Parmée was a lecturer in modern languages at Cambridge and a Fellow of Queens’ College for 60 years. He was also known as a fine and wideranging translator. His translations included Effi Briest (Theodor Fontane) and Bel-Ami (Guy de Maupassant) for Penguin Classics; A Sentimental Education (Gustave Flaubert), Nana (Emile Zola) and Les Liaisons dangereuses (Pierre Choderlos de Laclos) for the OUP World’s Classics series; and, for Short Books, a selection from the aphorist Nicolas Chamfort. He also published two anthologies: Twelve French Poets (1957), which was for some years an A-level text, and Fifteen French Poets (1974).

As well as being Director of Studies in French he spent time at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, Jamaica, and in Barbados and at the University of Western Australia.

The style of his work can be judged from a review of Liaisons, which praised a racy, colloquial and accurate translation, a well-honed introduction and helpful notes.

That raciness, allied to his remarkable facility with languages and a relish for the unconventional, led Parmée into some of the byways of Francophone literature, including the crique-craque tradition of Haitian folk fables, which, he liked to assert, were superior to those of La Fontaine. He visited Papa Doc’s Haiti and became the English expert on Haitian literature, giving talks on the Third Programme.

This feeling for négritude, though not assumed, gave him further pleasure by the irritation it caused to some. Symbolism and Surrealism were also among his interests, but his true forte was a deep knowledge of and admiration for French novelists of the 19th century.

He was born in West Dean in Sussex in 1914 — despite the name, there was no French blood in the family for at least 300 years. He attended Simon Langton Boys’ School in Canterbury and then the Perse School in Cambridge. In 1933 he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, as a teacher training college student. He took a first in both parts of the modern and medieval languages tripos, becoming an exhibitioner in 1934 and a senior scholar in 1935. He left in 1936 to do post-graduate work at the University of Bonn and a doctorate at the Sorbonne.

Although his doctoral thesis on the symbolist Henri de Régnier had been published, he never took the degree.

Back in England he became secretary of the students’ department in the London office of the British Council from 1939 to 1941, when he was claimed by RAF Intelligence and then the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park. There he worked in Hut 3, in the team that translated and interpreted decrypts from Hut 6. In 1944 he married Gwen Hepworth (“Wendy” — he had a habit of using his own versions of names and places); his best man was John Cairncross, later exposed as a Soviet spy and dubbed the Fifth Man by the press.

In 1946, after a postwar stint in Berlin, he joined the French department at Cambridge, and soon became a Fellow of Queens’ College, where he remained until he retired.

It was after the success of his Twelve French Poets that he turned to translation, and his output ranged widely. As well as the classics already mentioned, it included Sons of Kings by Joseph-Arthur de Gobineau; the thriller Dossier 51 by Gilles Perrault; eight articles in Italian Fascisms, from Pareto to Gentile (from the Italian); Lelio Basso’s Rosa Luxemburg, a Reappraisal, also from the Italian; The Second World War by Henri Michel (co-awarded the Scott Moncrieff Prize); and An Exemplary Life (Das Vorbild) by Siegfried Lenz, which won an award from the PEN Club of New York.

He enjoyed lecturing — and once lectured on Surrealism dressed in cap, gown and black tights. He was also steward of his college and on the wine committee, duties from which he derived much pleasure.

He was divorced from his first wife in the early 1970s, and soon married Margaret (Meg) Clarke. After his retirement in 1981 they went to live in Adelaide, South Australia.

In retirement, without academic and financial distractions, he worked on his translations harder than ever, exploring his taste for the recondite or undervalued as well as for the classics. He took particular pleasure in the selection from Chamfort, whose humorous appreciation of human nature he likened to Montaigne’s.

Parmée is survived by two sons and a daughter of his first marriage and by his second wife, Meg, and their son.

Douglas Parmée, translator and academic, was born on June 6, 1914. He died on August 11, 2008, aged 94