In Boxing, Interpreters Bring Clarity to TV Coverage The day before his April bout in Las Vegas with the junior middleweight contender James Kirkland, Nobuhiro Ishida met with the HBO announcers. Ishida, a slender Japanese boxer, was a considerable underdog and he looked the part. "He had delicate bones - handsome kid," the announcer Jim Lampley said. "I said to people in the room, "He looks like he would be more comfortable dancing in a revue down the street." " Ishida scored a first-round technical knockout of Kirkland - Lampley said it was a bigger upset than Buster Douglas's victory over Mike Tyson in 1990. And yet, after the fight, the analyst Max Kellerman interviewed the vanquished Kirkland first. "We're trying to talk to Ishida, the winner, also," Kellerman said during the postfight coverage. We're looking to see if we have a translator. This is such a shocking upset, we didn't have one on hand. Kellerman ultimately interviewed Ishida with his trainer, Daisuke Okabe, reluctantly interpreting the brief chat, as he had done at the meeting with HBO. "I didn't want to do it because my English is kind of broken," Okabe said recently. But no one else spoke English and Japanese. Okabe needed clarification after Kellerman described Ishida as cannon fodder for Kirkland. Like a victim, right? Okabe asked. The awkward episode, which occurred on the undercard of a pay-per-view event, magnified the role of an inconspicuous but vital cog in a boxing telecast: the interpreter. When boxing moved from network TV to closed-circuit TV, and eventually commercial-free pay-per-view and premium TV, one of the benefits was broadcasting the vociferous, frantic and often profane interactions between fighter and trainer between rounds. Technological advances, in the form of clearer microphones and unobtrusive cameras, as well as cooperation from the boxers" camps, took viewers into the corner. But for the many non-English-speaking fighters, producers turned to interpreters; Dr. Ferdie Pacheco and Ray Torres, who speak Spanish, were among the first. They work at news conferences and in meetings with broadcasters, but are most visible during the one-minute breaks between rounds and in postmatch interviews. "The instructions I give our guys is, you want to speak in the first person, you want to be accurate and you want to try and mirror the energy that is going on," said David Dinkins Jr., the executive producer of Showtime Sports. As Jerry Olaya, a Spanish interpreter for HBO, said: "The key is to be 100 percent accurate. You don't summarize things. You don't change things. You don't editorialize. You are there to be seamless. If you are not noticed, that's all the better. Despite the interpreter's best efforts, 100 percent accuracy is not possible, and sometimes, a boxer's rambling answer is considerably condensed. "If there is something I left out," Olaya said, "it's because I went blank, forgot about it or didn't hear it." Felix De Jesus, a color commentator for the Yankees" Spanish radio broadcast and an interpreter for Showtime boxing, agreed. "I definitely summarize if I know we have 10 minutes left on the air," he said. "Sometimes, they will say, "I want to thank my trainer, promoter," and then there'll be five or six more names. I'll say: "He thanks his family. He thanks Showtime for this opportunity. I definitely try to capture what he says but try to shorten for TV purposes. Because of the abundance of Spanish-speaking fighters, Olaya and De Jesus are the most recognizable in the field, but they are not employed full time by the cable networks. Interpreters for other languages are tougher to find.