Error with speaking to others in the Gorge

I'm pretty certain this is just a foreign language that DST won't load for whatever reason if you're not playing in that language, thus they are just replaced with ?s, like emojis you can't load being replaced by a square box.

Can you check if you have "small textures" enabled in the options menu?
If you do then this due to people speaking in a language which uses characters outside of the standard ascii set. If it is enabled then please disable all mods then validate your game files via steam. If it still happens after that, then next time this happens, please send me your log files (located at: \Documents\Klei\DoNotStarveTogether\client_log.txt)