The Hilltop Monitor had the opportunity to sit down with Dr. David Lisenby, associate professor of Spanish and director of the Honors Institute in Critical Thinking, to discuss all things Spanish – from the importance of learning a language to reading and analyzing literature to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) in writing and in translation work.

Lisenby teaches many courses at all levels of Spanish, but his favorite is SPA 315: Textual Analysis and Composition. For Lisenby, the course marks a shift in Spanish pedagogy: the first four courses in the Spanish sequence focus on grammar and vocabulary. In 315, though, students that are SPA majors and minors literally level up and focus on “[reading and studying] literature and social issues in Spanish that are not designed for English language students who are learning Spanish,” Lisenby explained. While his specialty is in Latin American literature and translation, he said he enjoys SPA 315 because it empowers students to “[talk] about social issues and… [get] better at expressing themselves [in Spanish].”

Lisenby was on sabbatical last semester, receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. He used that sabbatical to translate Abilio Estévez’s “How I Met the Sower of Trees,” a collection of short stories narrated “from spaces of queer desire separated from home and homeland.”

Over the course of our conversation, Lisenby brought up the rise of new AI translation models, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3 model, which is now on par with Google Translate when it comes to translation accuracy. Lisenby rejected the idea that machine translation software could ever be close to perfect; while ChatGPT-3 is decent at translating ideas, it can’t capture the emotional hook of literature, so it’s still a long way off, he explained.

This rise in AI doesn’t remove the human need to learn – or translate – languages, though. The impacts of learning language, noted Lisenby, come in our experiences with other people: “[No technological intervention] can take the place of human-to-human contact, and even learning a little bit of another language makes it possible to have human-to-human contact with someone who doesn’t speak English, and I find that magical.”

To people who find learning a language daunting, Lisenby is empathetic: “There is no shortcut to learning a new language brilliantly and easily.” It’s not easy to learn a new language, and it can seem impossible at times, but Lisenby is confident that anyone can do it with help. He suggests finding conversation partners to maximize language input and output, further emphasizing the human aspect of learning a language.

As AI gets better and better, students may be tempted to let it do the hard work of language and translation for them. With the rise of ChatGPT and other machine learning tools, many fields are having to adapt. Will we bow down to the omnipotent AI overlords? Maybe. Machine learning may get better at writing films or stories, or at solving math problems, or whatever else we throw at it. However, as Lisenby noted: “There will always be a place for human-to-human interaction,” and learning a new language is a great way to find that interaction.

“One of [Fulleda’s] plays has been previously translated to French and German and maybe Italian but never to English, even though it has been performed in the U.S. in Spanish. So I started with telling him I would be happy and interested to translate [Ruandi] to English, that was a few years ago, which he was thrilled about, without really knowing what I was getting myself into,” Lisenby said.

Working to translate “Ruandi” was Lisenby’s first experience in literary translation. The play has been performed in the U.S. and Europe in French, German and Spanish. Lisenby hopes his English translation will eventually lead to its being performed for English-speaking audiences. He has spoken with Chris McCoy, associate professor of theatre, and Nathan Wyman, professor of theatre, regarding the William Jewell College Theatre Department doing developmental readings of his translation so the play can become stageable.

Translating a literary work comes with a particular set of challenges. Lisenby states that no work has an innate translation. There is a range of possibilities when attempting to interpret a work in a language other than the one in which it was originally written.  

“Part of what makes a text a literary text as opposed to a non-literary text is the possibilities for interpretation of that text, that literary texts lend themselves to multiple interpretations. You can’t necessarily produce the same possibilities for interpretation because any given word has a constellation of connotations in a language and a so-called ‘equivalent’ in another language has a different constellation of connotations in that language,” Lisenby said.

Lisenby attempts to approach works he is translating by first understanding the socio-cultural context in which they were originally written. Literature can be read and interpreted in different ways depending on cultural perspectives, but Lisenby works to translate words or phrases that reflect the writer’s experience when the work was written.

In “Ruandi,” the titular main character is a 12-year-old Cuban slave boy who escapes from the plantation to a “palenque,” a slave community in the Spanish Caribbean. While the play takes place in the 1840s, it was written by Fulleda in the 1970s in Cuba under the Castro regime. Lisenby states that he has to take into account the culture in which Fulleda was writing “Ruandi” and what certain words or phrases likely meant in that context. Reading the play in the 1970s, under “the most repressive decade for freedom of expression since the 1959 Castro revolution,” can create an entirely different interpretation of the work than what the author intended.

“This play comes out addressing issues of racial inequalities in late 20th century Cuba through a filter of historical fiction. In translating the play, I have to think about how certain words and terms and scenes should be rendered given the cultural politics of the original writing of the play,” said Lisenby.

Many students have at one point or another read a translated text. Lisenby believes that these works allow monolingual speakers to engage with different cultures and realize that the world operates and functions in many languages.

“Different languages aren’t just different ways to describe the world. Different languages are different ways to experience the world. Experiencing the world in a different language is not just experiencing the same thing with different words. It is a different experience,” he said.

Lisenby’s translation of “The Lagoon” by Cuban writer Abilio Estévez will appear in the June queer issue of the magazine Words Without Borders and will be his second published translation. He has been a fan of Estévez’s writing for many years. He stumbled upon the short story in an anthology of LGBTQ+ Cuban fiction and found it “deeply captivating.”

Lisenby is focusing on seeing his English translation of “Ruandi” being published for theatre. He will be searching for another project after that, which might be a Cuban novel or short story collection over the next few years. For more information on the impact of translation and how languages shape how the world is experienced, Lisenby recommends a New York Times article about the first woman to translate “The Odyssey” and an episode of the National Public Radio (NPR)  podcast “Hidden Brain.”

Photo by Talia Zook.