After her mother’s tragic death when she was only four, Danica and her elder brother Zoran were entrusted to the care of a loving maternal grandmother, and were only reunited with their father in 1931 in Berlin, where he had remarried and was lecturing at the University.
In 1945 she was awarded a French government scholarship and returned to Paris to escape from the communist regime founded by Marshal Josip Broz Tito.
She signed up for the Agrégation but was forced to curtail her studies when her French government scholarship ended and her father, who had stayed in Yugoslavia, was unable to support her financially.
The teams were made up of French business and opinion leaders from all areas of industry and commerce whose aim was to discover the keys to American productivity during missions of up to six weeks.
Soon after returning to France, Danica Seleskovitch left Paris again for Luxemburg, where she had been offered a position as an interpreter at the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) set up by Jean Monnet and Paul-Henri Spaak.
This intuition, based on her experience as an interpreter, was more akin to the conclusions of psychological and cognitive studies of language, which were also beginning to break this new ground at the time.
From the 1980s onwards Danica Seleskovitch devoted most of her time to teaching and research in translation studies at the École supérieure d'interprètes et de traducteurs (ESIT), Université Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle.