Sylvia Daiches Raphael was born in Sunderland on 21 February 1914, of Flora Levin and Rabbi Dr Salis Daiches. She moved to Edinburgh in 1919 when her father became rabbi of the city's Hebrew Congregation. She later attended George Watsons' College and the University of Edinburgh, graduating with first-class honours in French in 1936. After this she completed a BLitt at Oxford in French philology, but had to interrupt her studies to do her war service at the Treasury in London alongside Iris Murdoch. After a few years in New Zealand, she lived in Glasgow from 1949 to 1972, where she was appointed to a post at the university in the 1960s.

Sylvia Raphael was primarily a linguist, but she also completed distinguished translations of works by Balzac, as well as by George Sand and Mme de Staël, mostly for OUP in the 1990s.

Sylvia Daiches met the academic David Raphael at Oxford, and they married in 1942. Together they had two daughters.

She died on the 6th of October 1996 in Kingston upon Thames. She is buried in Edinburgh’s Piershill Cemetery, where her tombstone can read "a fine scholar and an even finer person".