# Questions and Answers

Why does &kbabel; show question marks when entering language specific characters?

This is a problem with your locale settings. The following might help: Exit &kbabel;, in a shell set the environment variable `LANG` to a locale, valid for your language. If you use `bash` do ``export `LANG`=`change this```. For example, when you use german characters, do ``export `LANG`=de_DE.88591``. Then start &kbabel; from this shell. If the problem is gone, insert this command in your `~/.profile`.

Why does &kbabel; show question marks instead of language specific characters after loading a PO file?

The text contains characters, which can not be displayed with your system font. If you are sure, that the text contains no such characters, the file might have been corrupted somehow. In this case, mark such a question mark and press &Ctrl;F to find all the corrupted characters and replace them.

Do not search for real question marks, because these characters are only displayed as question marks, but internally they are different characters.

Otherwise you might want to install an Unicode font, which contains all necessary characters.