mojibake

<b> Forum for those teaching business English </b>

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Itasan
Posts: 557
Joined: Wed Nov 05, 2003 8:22 am
Location: Yokohama, Japan

mojibake

Post by Itasan » Sat Jul 02, 2005 11:16 pm

I'm typing 'mojibake' in Japanese below:
&#25991;&#23383;&#21270;&#12369;
I'm sure it's illegible to most of you if you do not have a Japanese system installed on your computer.
What do you call this phenomenon?
1. garbage characters
2. changed characters
3. garbles (garbled characters; garbling)
4. ghost characters
5. gobbledygook
6. mis-coded characters
7. random characters
8. scramble
9. strange characters
10. stupid characters
11. unreadable characters
12. any other?

fluffyhamster
Posts: 3031
Joined: Tue Oct 26, 2004 6:57 pm
Location: UK > China > Japan > UK again

Post by fluffyhamster » Sun Jul 03, 2005 5:54 am

People who experience problems with the Japanese text that I sent them usually report back along these lines:

I can't read it; My PC can't display it/can't handle Japanese characters
It's just (come out as) a load of nonsense/garbage/crap/junk

So, 1. and 11. from your list come the closest. (Not sure we'd use 'illegible', at least not with its "correct" meaning).

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Lorikeet
Posts: 1374
Joined: Sun May 18, 2003 4:14 am
Location: San Francisco, California
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Post by Lorikeet » Sun Jul 03, 2005 9:46 am

I just got 4 question marks instead of the usual gobbledygook. ;)

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