A response to Pam Galante's post

Do you think that it is possible for companies to recover from serious cross cultural blunders? Can you think of examples of companies (or even individuals) whose reputations have been ruined permanently or temporarily because of their misunderstanding of a culture/language?

 Of course I think it's possible for companies to recover from blunders like this, but not without incurring monetary and reputational costs.  One example of such a misunderstanding is when the swedish furniture company IKEA named one of it's desks FARTFULL, obviously implying that the desk is unclean or smelly.  Although if fixed quickly, blunders like this may not hurt the companies reputation it is a waste of time and money to have to take a few steps backwards and fix problems like this.