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

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 (López Tirado and Ortego Antón, in press). Furthermore, machine translation (MT) is frequently used for the cross-linguistic transfer of culinary tourism brochures 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 Spanish 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 will allow us to assess the degree to which the product is altered and whether behavioral patterns associated with the different MT systems are detected.