When a modern UTF-8 string (where one character can be 3 bytes) is read by an older system that interprets every byte as a single character, you get a "garbage" string of accented letters and symbols.

Specifically, this text appears to be a that was likely originally written in a non-Latin script (such as Chinese, Japanese, or Russian) and encoded in UTF-8 , but is being displayed as if it were Windows-1252 or ISO-8859-1 . Common Causes for this Text

How can I avoid producing mojibake? - ftfy: fixes text for you