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I'm typing 'mojibake' in Japanese below:
文字化け
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?
"mojibake", a compound meaning "character" (moji) + "change(d)" (bake), or changed character", was borrowed into the English language from Japanese. In Chinese it's called "luanma", chaotic codes.
6., 7., and 8. would be the closest, but please note, "mojibake" is used in English. It's a borrowing, like "taco" from Spanish, "sushi" from Japanese, and "pizza" from Italian.
Thank you, Harakiri, and yes, 'bake' is written the same way
in both words. Does this work OK on your computer? 化け
It might have become mojibake. LOL
BTW, we seem to use 'bakemono' in two meanings.
I think what you are thinking about is 'ghost'. The other
meaning is 'monster'.
Itasan
mojibake 
Linear Mode
