Mojibake文字化け

gibberish text caused by the wrong character encoding [wikipedia]

or, when unicode goes wrong.

picture of a beat up package that was apparently sent to Russia back in 2002, judging by the date on the label. the address on the package is unintelligble because it's handwritten gibberish. someone has written the correct Cyrillic characters above the gibberish address.

Handwritten Mojibake

Allegedly, a French person tried to send their Russian friend a package by writing the friend's address exactly as it appeared in their email client. Unfortunately, there was a unicode issue: the French person's email client did not display the Cyrillic characters correctly and, instead, "substituted the diacritic symbols from the Western charset (ISO-8859-1)." Thankfully, the Russian postal workers were still able to decipher address and deliver the package. [see: story & image source]

So, did this story really happen? At one point, this story and image were on Wikipedia, but they were deleted years ago due to poor sourcing. *womp womp*

Either way, you can definitely see that someone deciphered the address & wrote the correct Cyrillic characters in red over the mojibake (or krakozyabry, in Russian) phrases written in black.

you've probably encountered mojibake
in your own web adventures.