This will be a pretty major clue, but…
English is relevant in that the system was designed to display titles in English, and that was the problem.
Did the misrepresentation apply to the book’s original-language market? For example, if it was written in French, would shoppers in France have seen the misrepresentation?
Did it apply to a market other than the original language? For example, would US shoppers looking for the French version have seen it misrepresented?
Would it help if we could determine the original language?
I’m not sure who all was able to see the error, but speakers of the original language would immediately recognize it as an error, while English speakers might not.
Knowing the original language is important.
So, to be clear, the description contained a sequence of letters in a foreign language that means ‘butt’ in English, is that correct?
If correct, was it the book title? The author’s name? The plot summary?
The title is the relevant part.
Does the answer have something to do with a phrase that would be understood as an idiom in one language but not the other?
Was the original non-English title therefore displayed in the description?
Was the original title in a language that uses Latin script?
If not was the original language Crycllic?
No
Was the original title in a language that uses Latin script? Yes
Okay let’s pull on this thread a little bit more…
Was the book title French?
Spanish?
Italian?
Portuguese?
German?
Spanish
Was the word in question culata or a variation?
Was it colilla and misinterpreted as “rear end”?
No
Thinking out loud here.
So a Spanish title gets misinterpreted due to the system that displays titles in English. But the misinterpretation is not from picking butt-related substrings from the Spanish title, nor does it relate to the English version.
I’ve looked back over the clues, and it seems you’ve ruled out the English version of a piece of Spanish literature, but not necessarily the English translation of the Spanish title.
So is it correct to say that Amazon presented a title of a classic Spanish work in Spanish and in English, but the English title was either mistranslated or ambiguously meant “butts”?
No
And I’m starting to think this may be ungettable if you don’t know the specific Spanish-language title, but I’ll offer the following clue: Nothing is actually being translated. A Spanish word is being displayed incorrectly.
Did a diacritical mark throw something out of whack?
I had to do some Google Translate, but I see Cólera = Cholera, and Culera = Asshole. Or maybe Google just switched to Corsican.
Is the title El amor en los tiempos del cólera?
Cien anos de soledad, without the tilde?
Did the title have some kind of letter configuration that looked like a butt when displayed in a text field?
Yes!
One Hundred Years of Solitude became One Hundred Anuses of Solitude, because their early system couldn’t handle diacritical marks.
Henry was a fine man and definitely a keeper, that’s for sure. However, it is not his life, but the circumstances of his tragic death that were so unique and bizarre, people still talk about them to this day. How exactly did he die?
Just to get this out of the way: True story, don’t Google, happened in the 1700’s, but date not relevant.