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. How can I translate &kde;? You can look for information about how to translate KDE in the The KDE Translation HOWTO.