In Bulgarian, mojibake is often called majmunica (маймуница), meaning "monkey's [alphabet]". In Serbian, it is called đubre (ђубре), meaning "trash".

In German, Buchstabensalat ("letter salad") is a common term for this phenomenon, and in Spanish, deformación (literally deformation).

Mojibake means "character transformation" in Japanese. The word is composed of 文字 (moji, IPA: [mod͡ʑi]), "character" and 化け (bake, IPA: [bäke̞], pronounced "bah-keh"), "transform".