Lidl sells children's jackets in 'rot' color

Could this be the new fall-winter 2025 trend? On its website, Lidl Switzerland recently offered children's jackets in a surprising selection of colors: navy blue or... rotten. "Nice selection," smiled one reader who stumbled upon the sale.

In reality, fashion has nothing to do with it. Rather, it's the AI ​​that has committed an amusing linguistic "fail." Take a look. On the German version of the website, this salmon color is labeled "rot," meaning "red," in the language of Goethe. When it came to adapting this word for the versions of the site in other national languages, the software got confused and decided to use English as the base language. The problem is that in English, "rot" no longer means "red" at all, but "rot." This is why this new jacket color was found in French and Italian ("marcire").

A good sport, the discounter admits to "a translation error" in the text accompanying the red jacket in question. "We apologize for this oversight," says its spokesperson. "We have already corrected it. Therefore, French- and Italian-speaking children will also wear a red jacket." No hard feelings, then. After all, no one is immune to inattention with AI. And even less so "20 minutes," right?