Machine Translation and Tourism Discourse

In the last few decades, tourism has consistently played a significant role in the Spanish economy. Spain, one of the world's most popular tourist destinations, received 9.6 million international tourists in September 2024, according to the Spanish National Institute of Statistics (INE, 2024a). Due to the significance of the tourism sector, it is particularly important that Spain’s most visited tourist attractions offer high-quality information in multiple languages on their websites to ensure that as many people as possible look up the information contained therein, as businesses and other stakeholders in the tourism sector can benefit significantly from website localisation. For this study, the linguistic adequacy of the websites of Spain’s top 20 tourist attractions as well as their official localised versions in English and French were analysed by taking into account a series of parameters related to best practices in web localisation (Olvera-Lobo and Castillo-Rodríguez, 2019; Tercedor Sánchez, 2005). Furthermore, the official localised websites in English and French were compared with the translation proposals of DeepL and Google Translate to assess the quality of the machine-translated tourism-themed content. The results obtained show poor quality in terms of localisation and linguistic adequacy for the official Spanish, English and French versions of the analysed websites. Regarding the overall assessment of the machine-translated content, DeepL performed better than Google Translate and outperformed the official websites localised into English in terms of linguistic quality.