I think this imagery comes out of nowhere. Personally, I find this entire piece to be pretty dry, and when I was reading this part it sort of surprised me because it seemed like suddenly the authors were trying to make the writing entertaining and engaging, which I believed they didn't care about given the rest of the piece. In regards to the metaphor, I believe it does its job at translating the meaning, however again, the entire sentence seems to just not fit in with the other writing.

I'm confused as to why this part of the sentence is even included. Yes, the languages of french and Spanish are both important to learn for different reasons, both serving different academic purposes that would likely be useful later in life, but the fact that Spanish is "interesting" to the writers doesn't really seem important in this professional documents as they analyze what languages to focus on at the university. It just seems like a very superficial introduction to why they chose Spanish.