NATCHEZ — Miss-Lou residents who tuned in to the New Orleans Saints game Sunday night may have needed a Spanish-English dictionary for the first three quarters because of equipment malfunction by the broadcasting company.

Cable One General Manager John Hilbert said portions of the Saints game vs. the Carolina Panthers included an audio broadcast in Spanish because of equipment malfunction of Fox 48, the local affiliate that transmits throughout the Natchez and Alexandria, La. area.

“Cable One takes responsibility for notifying our customers of any problems and doing our best to fix problems as they occur,” Hilbert stated in an email. “In this situation, we were not notified of any changes to any equipment by Fox 48.

“Although I do understand that they assumed what they were doing should not have caused a problem, it did.”

A Fox manager claimed the equipment swapped the two channels of audio received from the network and caused the station to take the Spanish audio feed.

“This, unfortunately, caused issues with some distribution channels, but not all,” the Fox manager stated in an email to customers sent Monday morning. “This was an unforeseen issue — one which cannot be planned for, and we apologize for the temporary inconvenience it caused.”

Hilbert said Cable One officials were able to do a “work-around” to get the English audio back by the third quarter.