IKEA Selling Product That Translates As ‘Cuddle Rape’

IKEA, the Swedish furniture company, is selling a product that translates as ‘Cuddle Rape’ in the United Kingdom.

The item goes by the name of Gosa Raps and normally costs $60, but a customer discovered that it translates to the rather unsavoury and inappropriate words above when they typed it into Google Translate.

The word Raps, the Swedish word for rapeseed which is a flower or plant, was cut in half by the online dictionary for the Ikea website, and this has lead to the confusion.

The Gosa Raps is described on the Ikea website as “a medium high down pillow for you who prefer sleeping on your back; provides support to your head and neck and reduces strain on your muscles.”

The customer posted his discovery on the Reddit website, but Swedish users of the site soon began to correct him.

IKEA has a long history of seeing their products translate rather unfortunately in different languages. This lead the company to hire translators last year, before they printed their catalogues in Thailand, because the items had different meanings in South-East Asia.

The Ikea plant pot Jattebra, which in Swedish means really good, translated as a slang word for sex in Thai, whilst the companies bed Redalen sounded very close to an oral sex reference too.

Earlier this month Target decided to rename their Orina sandals because the word means urine when it is translated from the Spanish language to English.

IKEA is the most successful furniture company in the world, and in 2012 it recorded a profit of over $5 billion, and it is now believed that one in ten Europeans are conceived on a bed from the company.

Earlier this year IKEA upset the LGBT and Transgender communities because of their advertisement, which they deemed offensive and labelled “disrespectful.” IKEA then spoke to the group over the telephone, and drafted a letter in response to the disagreement.