Mojibake

Article "Mojibake" in Wikipedia in Japanese using the encoding of Windows-1252.

A mojibake (pronounced [mod͡ʑibake]) is the distorted text that results from the decoding of text by unintended character encoding, displaying it as a completely different character (such as letters with accents, mathematical symbols, or question marks). Thus, "文字化け" can be displayed as "•¶Žš‰»‚¯".

Etymology

The word mojibake means "character transformation" in Japanese. The word is composed of 文字 (moji, IPA: [mod͡ʑi]), "character" and 化け (bake, Japanese pronunciation: /bäke̞/, pronounced « ba-ke"), "transformation".