The launch of Amazon’s Swedish website has been blighted by cultural gaffes and glaring mistranslations, including a listing for an Adidas “child sexual assault” football shirt.
The internet giant mixed up the Argentine and Swedish flags, labelled frying pans as items for women, allowed the sale of a swastika-emblazoned shower curtain and described a silicone baking mould as suitable for “chocolate, faeces, goose water and bread”.
The mistakes were so numerous that some Swedes began to speculate that they were a deliberate PR stunt. However, many of the errors appear to have been the result of a poorly designed computer translation programme that had struggled to cope with the multiple meanings of English words such as “rape”, “trunks” and “cock”.
Before its move into
