Skyrim: Place names in wrong language?

I have a bizarre issue in Skyrim (PC) where a few location names are displayed in another language, or perhaps gibberish for all I know. Has anyone experienced this, and if so, is there any known fix? I know it's probably mod related, as I have quite a few of those, but I can't imagine one which would change the language of only certain location names, even accidentally.

Attached is an example from the cave just near Riverwood. Can't recall what it's actually meant to be called, but I know it isn't this: http://i.imgur.com/AzNinOv.jpg

Best Answer

The Creation Kit is notorious for introducing "dirty" edits during mod-making, where an untouched part of the world gets added to the mod file. If a modder working from a non-English copy of Skyrim didn't clean their mod before release, this is the kind of thing dirty edits would do.

You can fix this by disabling all your mods one at a time (or better, by doing a binary search) until you find the culprit … or, instead, learn to use TES5Edit to diagnose and clean the mods yourself. Modders aren't all responsible about—or even aware of the need for—cleaning their mods as part of the release process, so it's a useful tool to add to your mod-using skills. And as a side effect, you get a more stable modded game—since certain kinds of dirty edits can actually cause crashes, and cleaning mods eliminates those too.

See the TES5Edit mod cleaning tutorial for how to get started.