Hit the post button too soon. Smith's mistake in translating it "You need more wives" is understandable considering the morphology of the characters involved and the extent of his pseudounderstanding of the paradyme he was working under. Thus it is perfectly underestandable that he mistranslated "Buy more" as "you need more" as the reformed character for "acquire" in the neutral sense is additional or increasing. The error in translating "Ovaltine" is a little more problamatical. As one regresses throught the thought processes Smith must have used late at night one quickly notices that reformed characters transliterated as "Oval" are one stroke away from "ovary". Now granted, this stroke could have actually been a scratch on the golden plates which the peep stone malfunctioned while translating. "tine" is a suffix often used to refer to people - so Smith transliterated ovary-people into "wives", since to tellogy the were worthless otherwise - hence reinforcing the mistranslated 'buy'. I hope that clears it up for you.
So it’s kind of like the Muslim translation confusion over whether they are getting 72 virgins or just 72 raisins.
Brilliant.
(I translated it as “Buy more Ho-Hos,” thus referencing both Chocolate and promiscuity.)