Open to Meraviglia? Can Automated Translation Change Tourism Promotional Campaigns?

This work examines the translation of institutional digital communication for the “Open to Meraviglia” campaign to determine whether—and how—automated translation has been employed. We compare machine- generated outputs (from NMT and GenAI tools) with what are presumed to be human translations. Our analysis reveals that the presumed human translation closely mirrors the original Italian, without being adapted to the specific cultural or communicative context, or accounting for the promotional intent of the text. On both the website and Instagram, translation errors are present, suggesting that either no post-editing or proofreading was conducted, or that the use of fully automated machine translation—given the quality of the GenAI output—was inadequate.