Multiword expressions in food tourism brochures and their machine translation: does context matter?

Abstract

Culinary tourism is a growing tourism sector, and although the literature on tourism translation is extensive, the gastronomic field remains a niche yet to be thoroughly explored (Ortego Antón & López Tirado 2024). Furthermore, machine translation (MT) is frequently used for the cross-linguistic transfer of culinary tourism bro-chures available on promotional websites, despite the fact that multiword expressions (MWEs) pose a challenge for MT systems. Recognizing that MT is here to stay, this paper tests whether the context of a sample of MWEs, extracted from a corpus of Span-ish culinary tourism brochures, alters the product resulting from the cross-linguistic transfer to English in a selection of MT systems of different types. The results of the analysis allowed us to assess the degree to which the output was altered and to estab-lish three behavioral patterns that can be associated with the different MT systems.