Making a test for translations unbiased by images

[qoltedy]

In theory, one could verify the translation by seeing if the passage actually makes sense or just outputs gibberish, and whether it can reasonably match the visual content.

The two criteria you mention are highly subjective, so they don’t help much for validation. Many medieval texts don’t make sense from a rational point of view, and Voynich images are so obscure that we can argue endlessly about what is a “reasonable match” according to our subjective taste.

It’s much better if one focuses on grammar, a subject about which it’s easier to reach some consensus.


The passage must be grammatically correct according to the grammar of an actual language. The translation is not even interesting from my personal point of view: what interests me is that the “translator” can point out the grammar of the supposed underlying language and why the words appear in that specific order.

hell it self is weary of earth: for why? the son of darknesse cometh now to challenge his right: and seeing all things prepared and provided, desireth to establish himself a kingdom

Does the passage above make sense? We can have different opinions about that. But I think most people would agree that it is grammatical English (e.g. verbs agree with subjects “hell is weary” is OK, “hell are weary” isn’t; "and" connects two words sharing the same form: "prepared and provided" is OK - "seeing all things prepared and self" is not OK).

Similarly, most people would agree that the following passage is not English, but just a word-salad:

earth: darknesse the himself it a now to to challenge hell why? desireth all of of right: is son and and prepared for self weary things seeing cometh provided, kingdom establish his

I would argue that if we are to take the hypothesis of an a priori constructed language seriously, rather than a cipher of an existing language, even the grammar structure could again be interpreted as subjective. That passage may not make sense from a traditional SVO grammar structure, but with an arbitrarily constructed grammar structure, your above example passage COULD make sense in a constructed language. The challenge would be the consistency of that grammar structure throughout the manuscript, if it always followed SOV/VSO/SVO in some predictable scheme.

I would say that consistency across the entire corpus in terms of word meanings and grammar structure, is likely one of the few ways to verify a translation if it's a constructed language.