A medical doctor with business contacts flattered me a few weeks ago by asking if I’d translate into Spanish a set of instructions for a new device designed to replace the traditional baby bottle and resemble human anatomy.
     The invention is conical, with a nipple in front and a plug in back for filling: milk straight from the store or from the mother.

     The doctor assured me that a “Mexican expert” had already done the preliminary work, and my job, mainly checking his spelling and punctuation, would be a piece of cake.
     That piece of cake proved more than a mouthful, not just for the nursing babies but for translators as well.
     Here’s what happened:
     The nursing device is being marketed in the U.S., and because breast-feeding — or the next-nearest thing — is the right thing to do, the company sought to invade areas like Mexico and Latin America. The ersatz breast is quite realistic. The one I examined in Dr. Bill Dean’s office would have made even Janet Jackson proud.
     So here’s where my expertise was to come into play. All I needed was to proofread what a Mexican translator had roughed out. Simple? Not quite. Having started from scratch would have been preferable.
     I looked at the Spanish translator’s handiwork and realized the magnitude of the job that lay ahead.
     Now in my opinion, few people like me actually write in Spanish; the manifold tildes, accent marks and inverted punctuation marks really slow down the process for someone on a standard keyboard. On my Mac laptop, it takes three extra keystrokes to place a tilde over the “n” in “Peña,” for example. On my PC, it’s impossible.
     During our two-months stay in Spain in 2002, we Highlands students made use of cyber cafes where, for a Euro or two, we could log on to their computers, and check our stateside email.
     Now those keyboards took some getting used to. The characters really were in Spanish, and the alphabet had a different configuration.
     Apparently the Mexican expert wasn’t entirely abreast on translation and doubtless kept a dictionary handy. But here’s where the English-Spanish linguistic paths diverge and create havoc.
     On many occasions I’ve mentioned that English is too bloomin’ unphonetic. Whereas in English, “ghoti” can be manipulated to form the sound of the English word “fish,” and “phtholognyrr” is pronounced “turner,” Spanish characters pretty much stand for just one sound. In English, one can seldom tell for sure how things are pronounced when one uses only orthographic clues as a guide.
     So the bugaboo came when I read in the Spanish version a caution that the devices sometimes cause babies to cry. Well my feeling on crying is that the first whimper sends most moms into hysterics, as if crying were the worst thing, a guarantee that something’s wrong. But I digress.
     Back to the bawling induced by the manufactured nourishment source. I wondered what in the composition of the nursing device would make a baby cry other than prying it away from the baby, or maybe sterilizing the nipple in El Rialto-type salsa.
     There were a couple of uses of “llorar,” the Spanish word for “cry.” And there appeared “lagrimas,” (tears, rhymes with beers). So I called my sister Dorothy Maestas, a retired languages professor, and my friend Julian Vigil at Luna Community College, who has taught courses in translation.
     The alleged crying came about when the Mexican translator apparently misinterpreted a common English word. The “tears,” it turns out — and here’s the crux of my issue with the unphonetic nature of English — came from the warning in the original English version that “sometimes the device tears,” and “tearing sometimes occurs.”
     “Tearing” rhymes with “herring,” but the translator assumed it rhymed with “hearing,” and that’s what he assumed was the source of the bawling, as in the expression, “His eyes began tearing.”
     In a nutshell, when kids grow teeth, they tear (rhymes with bear) things, and any falling tear (rhymes with beer) comes from being swatted by a flustered mom who needs to buy a new nursing device — or perform first aid on herself.
     By assisting me in the proper insertion of Spanish verbs like “rascar” and “romper,” both of which mean “to tear (rhymes with bear), my friend Julian and sister Dorothy may have saved an industry, not to mention obviating a lot of confusion and prevented much wailing and weeping.