I recently came across a question in one of my self-study workbooks asking me to translate this sentence:
The smell of enchiladas circulates through the house.
I put:
El olor de las enchiladas circula por toda la casa.
However, the answer key lists the correct translation as:
El olor a enchiladas circula por toda la casa.
Why does this sentence use "a enchiladas" here instead of "de las enchiladas" (or simply "de enchiladas")? When I plug it into Google Translate, "El olor de las enchiladas," "El olor de enchiladas," and "El olor a enchiladas" all produce the same result.
The closest I could come to an answer was on this site, where it gives these uses for prepositions:
Preposition Translation
a to, at, from, by, on, for, upon
de of, about, on, with, because of, by, at
The only guess I have based on that is that the general meaning of "of" in the English example corresponds more with "from."