Renate Schmidgall, born in Heilbronn, is a German translator from Polish. She studied Germanic and Slavic Studies at Heidelberg University. From 1984 to 1990 she worked as a librarian, from 1990 to 1996 as a research assistant at the German Polish Institute in Darmstadt. Since then, she is a freelance translator for Polish literature. The best-known authors she has translated are: Stefan Chwin, Witold Gombrowicz, Paweł Huelle, Andrzej Stasiuk and Mirosław Nahacz.

Renate Schmidgall lives in Darmstadt. For her work she received the Jane Scatcherd price of the Ledig-Rowohlt Foundation in 2001 and the European Translation Prize Offenburg in 2006. In 2009 she was awarded the Dedecius price jointly with Karl Ryszard Wojnakowski.