This study presents the professional and life story of translator Marta Hellmuthová (1917–1988), both in the context of cultural and political history and as a contribution to the so‑called translator studies. Hellmuthová, the educated and linguistically gifted wife of a diplomat, decided to learn Finnish in order to make Mika Waltari’s novel Sinuhet The Egyptian available to Czech readers. Thanks to archival research, it was discovered that the translation of one of the most popular books in the Czech Republic was partly done in the late 1950s behind the bars of the Pardubice correctional labour camp, where Hellmuthová had been wrongly imprisoned. While the 1950s and 1960s were a period in which she struggled to establish a position as a translator, the years of so‑called normalization, which brought significant progress in Czechoslovak‑Finnish relations, strengthened her position and allowed her to become Waltari’s “court translator” and at the same time an esteemed translator from Finnish; this thanks to her determination, hard work and high‑quality translations, and probably also years of good relations with the diplomatic corps of Finland.

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