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My screen font sprinkles Russian words in documents. I happens in my email, and on any page I try to read. Pages sometimes load correctly and suddenly the characters change while I'm reading. If I reload, different words are in Russian on reload. Any ideas? Neither Mcfee nor Malwarebytes finds any problem.
joanna
Posted 2013-10-05T20:03:11.870
Reputation: 1
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Wow, this is some scary stuff - it is legible Russian text! But, it is not font manipulation, it is actual text replacement that you are observing.
The only thing that comes to mind is that you have some automatic translation software installed, which tries to translate some (but apparently, not all) English words and phrases into almost correct Russian counterparts. Google Chrome has a setting to automatically translate web pages. If you are seeing this only in Chrome, that must be it.
If you are seeing it in other desktop applications like Thunderbird, it may be some other desktop translation software like AthHek Google Translate Desktop or ABBYY Lingvo. Finally, it may be a virus, but this is not very likely due to complexity of the effort needed.
mvp
Posted 2013-10-05T20:03:11.870
Reputation: 3 705
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You wouldn’t have happened to install a learn-foreign-languages Chrome extension have you?
There are a few extensions that help you learn foreign languages by translating random words on each page. (I tried out Language Immersion a while back, and while it was certainly amusing and potentially useful, I eventually disabled it for productivity reasons.)
You can check your installed extensions by going to the following page (or using the menu command Chrome ⇨ Tools ⇨ Extensions:
chrome://extensions
Synetech
Posted 2013-10-05T20:03:11.870
Reputation: 63 242
I don't know why this hadn't occurred to me. I did have Mind the Word installed on a different computer, but in German. Somehow the program loaded on my daughter's netbook in Russian. I don't know how or why since I hadn't ever used the program on her machine. Problem is fixed. Thanks for your help. – joanna – 2013-10-06T03:47:15.997
Yup, Mind the Word is one of them, so that’s probably it. Try disabling it. If it stops, then that’s your answer. You can configure it to your liking.
– Synetech – 2013-10-06T03:52:38.063
1What makes you think they are Russian? If it is really Russian, it is legible Russian text (if you know Russian, that is) or is it simply junk text using Cyrillic characters? – mvp – 2013-10-05T20:30:04.700
I have attached your question to show the problem. Can you help with this issue? I have run Norton in addition to McAfee and Malwarebytes, but no issues were found.
What makes you думать they есть Russian? If it is на самом деле Russian, it is legible Русский язык text (if you know Russian, that is) or is it simply junk текст using Кириллицей characters? – joanna – 2013-10-05T23:51:08.267
I have a hunch what it might be, but the raw text isn’t good enough, take a screenshot of an example and add it to the question. Also, what do you mean by your “email”? Do you mean an email client program or web-mail (in your browser)? – Synetech – 2013-10-06T00:44:12.430