One of the challenges in literary translation is the need to consider linguistic accuracy, pragmatic meaning, and reading experience all at once. It means that translators choose carefully between translation options, considering stylistic issues and the characteristics of the potential reader (mainly age and cultural features of the target context). From this perspective, this research analyses machine translation of five phraseological units from Spanish into Arabic, using the young adult novel Manolito Gafotas by Elvira Lindo (1994) as a corpus. The translations are assessed by 1. analysing their grammatical and semantic accuracy and 2. comparing them with the results of a survey conducted among six