Hi @zmandic,
I suspect the database you’re working with is not correctly configured for UTF-8, and the data may be double-encoded. Make sure your database is set up with a default character set of UTF-8 (see Multiple languages in ojs3.2 - #13 by asmecher) and that your data is properly loaded into it in UTF-8 format – you can use e.g. MySQLAdmin to check. Correcting this is more of a database administration task than an OJS task, so you might find some good general guidance on StackOverflow.com.
Try to keep things consistent – e.g. don’t start manually correcting characters unless you’re sure you want to do the whole thing that way. It’s a lot tougher to work with once encodings are mixed.
Regards,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team