Content suddenly converted to strange letters after save

Question

I was working in a .docx Microsoft Word document, and when I hit save to save the document, all the characters were transformed to unknown characters, well unknown characters to me at least, because they seem to appear as Asian letters. Here is a portion of the transformed document:

ࠀ ࠚ ࠛ ࠜ ࠼ ࠽ ࡦ ࢄ ࢢ ࣫ ँ ः त ृ क़ ख़ ग़ 뗇뗇醣楿坿㍅㍅ 
ᘢ⸲䌀ᡊ伀͊儀͊帀͊愀ᡊ洀᱈猄᱈ ᘢ镤䌀ᡊ伀͊儀͊帀͊愀ᡊ洀᱈猄᱈ ᘢ鱨䥓䌀ᡊ伀͊儀͊帀͊愀ᡊ洀᱈猄

What I tried so far is:

1. Passed some of this text to Google Translate. Google was able to detect several languages in the text such as Hindi and Chinese.

2. Saved the .docx as a plain text file. There were several encoding options to choose from. I tried them all from the following dialog box, but no solution:

   

The .docx seems to have a normal size of 85 kb for the amount of content it had, so I don't think there was any content that has been lost. More details: I was running low in local disc space.

• Operating System: Windows XP
• Microsoft Word version: 2007

So the questions are: what has happened in the background that caused the normal text to convert to such symbols and how do to retrieve the content it? I feel the .docx document has been converted to some other kind of file format, and now Word is unable to read it.

I am attaching the document to this link if that helps: https://www.dropbox.com/s/858v143ebqgdeij/AL-P0122074.docx?dl=0‏

Answer 1

Based on the info provided I'd say the document got corrupted, not converted to some other language or alike.

Corruption could be due to your mentioned lack of disk space, or a corrupted file system, or a bad drive, or flakey RAM, a bad network connection during save, etc., etc.

If it's truly corrupted, then you need to restore from backup.

Since a DOCX is just a zip file, try opening it with 7-Zip (or alike) and see if you can pull any info from it. If not, then it's gone for good.

Answer 2

The file is corrupted or it does not get read correctly by its os (Windows XP).
If you have not installed East Asian languages Do this:

• Access the Control Panel by clicking on Start --> Settings --> Control Panel. In the Control Panel, double click on "Regional and Language Options."
• Click on the Languages tab. Click on the check box marked "Install files for East Asian languages" and click OK.
• Click OK in the "Install Supplemental Language" alert box, and then click on OK in the Regional and Language Options dialog box.
• Click OK in the "Install Supplemental Language" alert box, and then click on OK in the Regional and Language Options dialog box.
• You will be prompted to insert the Windows XP installation disk which has the language support files. Insert the Windows XP installation CD, or if you have the language support files in another location, browse to the files and click OK. The language support files will be installed on your computer and you will be prompted to restart the computer.
• Click Yes to restart the computer.

For Visual Tutorial head here: http://mandarin.about.com/od/characters/ss/display_chars_4.htm

Answer 3

Why Western European (Windows)?

Choose UTF-8 from other encoding.