If you had not heard partner announce your 3H bid as transfers, what would you have thought his 3S bid meant?

I don’t understand why your partner thought 3H was a transfer, since you still had the whole 2 level to bid transfers at. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but it is my understanding that 3H in that sequence usually means a forward going hand with hearts. 3S would have been a cuebid in support of hearts. So, ethically speaking, you should not have passed 3H after you heard your partner announce it as a transfer. You should have pretended not to have heard partner say “transfer” and proceeded to act upon what his bid could have meant if he had read your 3H bid correctly.

Actually it was 2H. Sorry for the typo. But when he announced the transfer I was ethically bound not to have heard it. So, since 3S over 3C would have been to play, showing 5 nice spades and only 2 hearts, I passed having a hand not good enough to raise to 4S, which I would have had to do if I held a max with 3+ spade cards, even though I “knew” pard probably did not have 4+ spades. Ain’t this a great game!

Is partner really going to overcall 1NT when he has 5 GOOD spades? Why wouldn’t he have bid 1S in the first place? Even though I completely mis-read the auction initially, I still think it’s not very likely that partner is 5-3-3-2 and has 5 good spades and failed to open with them.

I have to assume he has the hand that makes sense in the auction without hearing his transfer announcement. The only thing he could have in that event is 15-17 with 5 spades. It doesn’t have to make sense in reality, just in what I must give him to overcome the fact that I heard him say transfer.