Its not in some dialect ... Its BAD SPANISH

Dear MAVRO developer:

If there are any medical professionals who are actually fooled by what you are claiming, then you are doing them a great disservice.

Written and formal Spanish is much more standardized than English. All Spanish speaking countries recognize the primacy of the Royal Academy in Spain, which standardizes not only the spelling but even the order of the Spanish alphabet. (The alphabet was changed a few years ago to better accommodate database tools.) Words are spelled the same in all countries.

All textbooks used in schools in Spanish speaking countries reflect the decisions of the Royal Academy. What differs from country to country is the slang and pronunciation, but not the words that a medical professional uses.

Spanish language television mostly reflects either Latin American or European usage and vocabulary, even though there are popular productions (such as tele-novellas) from countries like Columbia and Peru that have their own regional idioms and slang. Television Spanish is very standard. Radio Spanish and popular music take more liberties.

Only Argentina departs significantly from the grammatical norms of the rest of the Spanish speaking world. Yet all Argentinians understand standard European Spanish, which is what much of their television programming follows.

What a patient coming into an emergency room can be expected to understand is the standard Spanish of Latin American television, at a standard level of usage.

Even as a fluent Anglo-Spanish speaker, I have trouble with regional dialects. Often, they understand me much better than I understand them. But then, I also have some trouble understanding English as it is spoken in Ireland.

Your Emergency Medical Spanish Guide isnt written in some different dialect. Its written in badly transcribed Spanglish gibberish. If you really believe what you are telling me here, you are putting yourself on. Accent marks are an absolute necessity in Spanish, and they help to make the spelling and pronunciation of Spanish completely regular.

Your EMSG contains many misspelled words as well. For example, you spell Llame (double letter L) as lame. Hey, thats really lame! Or you have translated the Spanish command for push (empuje) as puje. Puje is the imperative for pujar, which means, to bid at an auction. I think a woman in labor would probably still understand, but is that the point? What if the doctor or nurse who purchases EMSG cares about learning Spanish right? You are insulting them and wasting their time.

You may notice that I have purchased and reviewed many of the Spanish apps in the App Store. To those apps that are of value, Ive been very generous in my reviews, giving many of them five stars. Unfortunately, there are a great many flashcard apps that are full of bad translations, often because some developer appears to have been trying to use the same code to create a whole family of language tools, but without actually knowing any Spanish.

EMSG is not even the worst of the lot. But your conviction that your EMSG is somehow an essential tool for medical professionals is either narcissistic hubris or self delusion. Do you actually believe the laudatory reviews of your own sock puppets? EMSG looks to me like a bad HyperCard stack from about 1990, and it could easily have been built in 1990 using such a tool.

Furthermore, your claim that EMSG is written in some kind of universal Spanish dialect is an insult to the ordinary men and women of Latin America. Ive been to rural parts of Mexico, Cuba, and Central America where many people, especially older people, have only 6-8 years of formal education, what we would consider basic literacy in the United States.

Yet Ive found that these people have great dignity and cleverness that belies their lack of formal education. Your attitude that we should teach American medical professionals who want to help them only some kind of beginner gringo Spanglish is both self serving and elitist.

I frankly dont care that you have created dozens of sock puppet accounts to lavish praise on your EMSG. If you hire a real bilingual Spanish speaker and fix the Spanish, getting all the accents and translations and spellings right, Ill withdraw my bad review. You can have your sock puppets.

I trust that Apple will eventually fix its review system, making it impossible for developers like you to thwart their system and boost their ratings using sock puppet accounts. But until then, you are crowding out more worthy developers and their apps. You are also wasting the time and patience of App Store customers who seek applications that really do help them learn Spanish.

For now, you do not have the level of education or expertise to teach others how to speak Spanish. Go find yourself another line of work.

Sincerely
Howard9999 can have sock puppets too if you do!

Sock Puppet #2 about AUDIO- Medical Spanish