[split] Did the VM go straight from cerebellum to vellum?

[Jorge_Stolfi]

whether it was “copied” from various sources and translated directly into the Voynicheese.

I could accept a direct translation to vellum if the "translation" was merely a substitution cipher.  Even then I would expect quite a few errors.  

If it was a complex cipher, or actual translation between different languages -- I don't think so.  

Translating from language A to language B is much harder than writing original prose directly in B.  Natural languages are all extremely ambiguous, and the ambiguities rarely match.  Thus the translator must be continuously choosing an interpretation of a source word or expression and looking for a word or expression that could be read with a similar meaning.  And often going back and changing a previous translation.

(Once I tried translating a bit of the Russian SciFi novel Roadside Picnic into Portuguese, with the help of Google Translate and three other translations in other languages.  I already had trouble with "Gospodin", that one source translated as "Boss" and another as "General".  Then I got stuck at a sentence like "He leaned back onto the desk and [BLIP]ed."  Where BLIP was a Russian verb that meant "to clasp one's hands once and then rub them together".  How would I translate that?!?)

All the best, --stolfi