Translation
When a historic document survives only in translation, the original having been lost, researchers sometimes undertake back-translation in an effort to reconstruct the original text. An example involves the novel The Saragossa Manuscript by the Polish aristocrat Jan Potocki (1761-1815), who wrote the novel in French and anonymously published fragments in 1804 and 1813-14. Portions of the original French-language manuscript were subsequently lost; however, the missing fragments survived in a Polish translation that was made by Edmund Chojecki in 1847 from a complete French copy, now lost. French-language versions of the complete Saragossa Manuscript have since been produced, based on extant French-language fragments and on French-language versions that have been back-translated from Chojecki's Polish version.
What language was The Saragossa Manuscript originally written in?
French
An example involves the novel The Saragossa Manuscript by the Polish aristocrat Jan Potocki (1761-1815), who wrote the novel in French and anonymously published fragments in 1804 and 1813-14.
The Saragossa Manuscript