Saudi college students majoring in translation take 6 interpreting courses. In those courses, they practice listening to and interpreting authentic lectures in a variety of subject areas. Results of an interpreting pretest showed that college students majoring in an interpreting course have problems with media reports. They have difficulty discriminating phonemes and comprehending the meaning of unfamiliar foreign proper nouns such as place name, names of politicians, organizations, chemicals or diseases that they encounter in oral media reports. Results of questionnaire-interviews with students showed that the source of difficulty was lack of prior knowledge and unfamiliarity with foreign proper names. [This paper was published in: "Proceedings of the 4th Brno Conference on Linguistics Studies in English titled 'Interpretation of Meaning in Spoken and Written Discourse'," 2010, pp. 97-109.]