The Potential of Large Language Models for Translating Tourism Promotional Texts: A Mixed-methods Study

Raghad Alsulami


Abstract
This paper reports on a mixed-methods pilot study examining the potential of a large language model (LLM) for translating tourism promotional texts (TPTs), in comparison with a conventional neural machine translation (NMT) system, from English into Arabic. Four professional translators participated in a post-editing experiment followed by semi-structured interviews involving cue-based retrospection. The post-editing task aimed to provide empirical evidence of the effort involved in working with TPTs, while the interviews sought to capture participants’ judgments and subjective evaluations of the outputs. Overall, most participants exerted less effort post-editing LLM-generated outputs to a publishable standard compared to NMT outputs. They perceived the LLM outputs to be more creative, with creativity manifested through non-literal translations and aesthetic augmentation, while also noting that the outputs were unpredictable and far from perfect; in contrast, the NMT outputs were generally viewed as more informative yet lacking the promotional appeal needed for TPTs. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of the findings and suggesting several avenues for future research.
Anthology ID:
2026.eamt-1.39
Volume:
Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1)
Month:
June
Year:
2026
Address:
Tilburg, The Netherlands
Editors:
Dimitar Shterionov, Eva Vanmassenhove, Mirella De Sisto, Fred Blain, Javad Pourmostafa Roshan Sharami, Lisa Lepp, Chiara Manna, Argentina Anna Rescigno, Alina Karakanta, Ayla Rigouts Terryn, Manuel Lardelli, Natalia Resende, Elena Murgolo, Janiça Hackenbuchner, Anna Zaretskaya, Miquel Esplà-Gomis, Thierry Etchegoyhen, Dagmar Gromann, Rachel Bawden, Barry Haddow, Sara Szoc, Mikel Forcada, Helena Moniz
Venue:
EAMT
SIG:
Publisher:
European Association for Machine Translation
Note:
Pages:
620–633
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.39/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Raghad Alsulami. 2026. The Potential of Large Language Models for Translating Tourism Promotional Texts: A Mixed-methods Study. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the European Association for Machine Translation (Volume 1), pages 620–633, Tilburg, The Netherlands. European Association for Machine Translation.
Cite (Informal):
The Potential of Large Language Models for Translating Tourism Promotional Texts: A Mixed-methods Study (Alsulami, EAMT 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.eamt-1.39.pdf