Spanish Idiom: Buscarle tres pies al gato

Today I learned the idiom “Buscarle tres pies al gato,” which, literally translated, means “to look for three feet on a cat.”

The meaning (in which I’m assisted by my friend and native Spanish speaker @kinduff), is: when someone is unnecessarily complicating a situation or looking for trouble that doesn’t exist.

Example:

Maria no debe buscarle tres pies al gato; ya tenemos bastante problemas.

I don’t know that there’s a good direct idiomatic analog in my dialect of American English, but just the phrase “Don’t overcomplicate things.” gets the meaning across.

Google Translate thinks that “splitting hairs” works. Kagi Translate offers up “making a mountain out of a molehill.”

Amusingly, it also shares something in common with one of [Occam’s] original formulations of Occam’s razor:

Non sunt multiplicanda entia sine necessitate

Which, translated, means “Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily.”