Calgary engineer believes he's cracked the mysterious Voynich Manuscript

[-JKP-]

Translations have to be evaluated in two ways.

• First you look at the translation and ask yourself, "Does this make sense?"
  
• Second you have to ask yourself, "Would they normally write it this way?"
  

For example, in English, you could say, "Keep you tomorrow health best," and everyone would understand it, but no one says it that way. They would normally say, "Take care," or "Be well," "Gesundheit," or "Watch out for your health," or a few other common phrases. No one would say, "Keep you tomorrow health best."

So... there is text that is understandable in a rough way. And there is text that is normal and conventional.

Some of the solutions proposed so far (in a variety of languages) have bits and pieces that seem understandable, but they are not normal phrases for the Middle Ages.


If it is understandable, but seems a bit odd AND the translation method has a lot of degrees of freedom, then you have to ask yourself if the degrees of freedom are resulting in a subjective "solution". Normally degrees of freedom make it easier to write something that is traditional and normal and yet, in the case of many VMS "solutions", this is not what happens. Even with all this freedom, translations are still grammatically odd or the grammar is nonexistent.