Is there a rule concerning nouns with foreign articles?
Solution 1:
According to The Los Angeles Times Stylebook, "In spite of the redundancies, it is perfectly acceptable to say the La Brea tar pits. La Brea is indeed Spanish for the tar, but in English La Brea is a place name and the translation is irrelevant. Therefore: They visited the La Brea tar pits."
Another example is the El Mocambo, a well-known bar in Toronto.
Solution 2:
The literal meaning of a name in its original language is largely irrelevant. If a foreign name has become embedded directly in English (as opposed to a translation, e.g. the capital of Argentina is Buenos Aires, not Fair Winds), it will follow English conventions with regards to articles, pluralization, compound formation, and so on. If not, then some may apply the rules of the original language, but others may not.
A similar phenomenon may be observed with loanwords. The plural of nom de plume may be noms de plume or nom de plumes, depending on whom you ask. But the plural of troika is troikas, almost never troiki.
With proper nouns, what gets adopted as the English name tends to be taken wholesale as a name. We would not double up articles where a name in English tends to take an article: The Habsburg general and the United Provinces general exchanged letters, not The Habsburg general and the The United Provinces general exchanged letters. We would not call a certain local government building the The Hague city hall. But if we take the Dutch name untranslated, no one will object to the Den Haag city hall, even though that would be the literal translation.
Rancho La Brea has been a fixture of Los Angeles for some time, and anyone who has followed the Los Feliz pronunciation controversy should not be surprised that La Brea is treated according to English rules, like many Spanish spellings and pronunciations that were anglicized in California in the late 19th and early 20th century. We say the La Brea Tar Pits just as naturally as we say the McKittrick Tar Pits, a few hours away.
But in the end, why would we expect speakers of any language to understand the vocabulary and usage of foreign ones, and to adjust to accommodate the foreign usages? We can find endless examples of names and other words that would be redundant if translated literally, among them
The -stan suffix in Persian and Urdu means place of or land of, but no one would object to the land of Kyrgyzstan on redundancy grounds.
the Sierra Nevada range in eastern California and western Nevada translates to Snowy Mountains; however, most refer to them as the Sierra Nevadas or the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Lake Malawi's historical name is Lake Nyasa, still used by Mozambique and Tanzania, even though niassa (variously transliterated) itself means lake or other large body of water.
Language is not rational.