Halloween Traditions Around the World

Halloween is an American Holiday filled with pumpkins, scary and funny costumes, candy, corn mazes, trick-or-treating and other festivities. While the Halloween is mostly centered around candy and commercialism, there are Fall festivities going on around the world with similar roots to the American holiday we celebrate. 

Nearly every culture around the world has a day (or days) meant to celebrate and remember the deceased, celebrate the fall harvest, or pay homage to our ancestors. Our Halloween is understood to be a relic from ancient Pagan and Celtic rituals from Ireland. 

Día de Muertos, is perhaps the most well-known Halloween-like holiday in North America. This festival in Mexico spans from October 31^st, until November 2^nd, and is a time to remember and pray for deceased loved ones. Recently portrayed in the Pixar film Coco, families often make ofrendas, which are private altars honoring their loved ones adding the favorite foods and sweets of the deceased as gifts. 

Meanwhile, in Hong Kong the Hungry Ghost Festival is celebrated by Buddhists around mid-September. Around this time of year, it is believed that spirits are able to visit the living, and so elaborate meals, and other gifts like gold and clothes are offered to aid the deceased. A famous tradition here is to light floating lanterns meant to guide the souls through the afterlife. 

Regardless of how you celebrate, we want to wish you a Happy Halloween!

AI Translators? Not Yet..

At an emerging industries and innovation conference in Shanghai earlier this year, the company iFlytek Co. got into some trouble for suggesting that their AI technology was providing instantaneous translations for speakers at the conference. It was discovered that in fact, the AI system was simply reading a translation previously completed by a human translator. 

The push in recent years for a real-life Babel Fish (the imaginary creature from Doulas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which instantly translates any language in the universe) has seen some great innovation and improvement in the industry. Every year AI and voice-recognition systems are improving in leaps and bounds to provide more accurate, and fluent translations, but they still have a long way to go. 

In the coming years it is not likely that human translators or interpreters will see their jobs threatened by this technology. The issue is that language is very flexible, dependent on context, cultural references, tone, and more. At the moment, this is too much for AI and computer programming to keep up with, and even human interpreters can only work for 20-30 minutes at a time. 

We can only guess at what the future may hold in terms of language translation devices. Someday perhaps it is likely that we will all be able to communicate with the help of an earphone listening and translating whatever we say, just not yet. 

PLG at the Chicago Pack Expo

The Pack Expo at McCormick Place has been a long-time expo for PLG to network and sell translation solutions in the Packaging Machinery world. As usual the show this year was one of the largest in Chicago, with over 2,500 exhibitors and an estimated over 50,000 visitors. 

We had a great time walking the show floor and networking with new exhibitors, as well as seeing a few familiar faces. The size and scope of the machinery, and robotics present at the show was truly impressive; watching and gaining a better understanding of how our client’s and prospective client’s products function is always time well spent. 

PLG’s services shine in an industry like packaging machinery, due to our highly certified and educated translators, our ISO certification, and Translation Memory system our team is a perfect fit to provide highly technical translations. From HMI text, to Operator Manuals, Sell Sheets and more, give us a call today for your next technical translation project!