Strange characters in MSSQL table

This is my first time working in a Microsoft environment, all of my experience being in Unix, so forgive me if my question is a common one (I looked but couldn't find anything quite like this).

I have a Microsoft SQL Server 2005 database, and many of the tables have text like the following:

¼ƒ¹ƒƒ…““ŽP ƒƒ…““ŽP ƒ

The above text seems to translate to NSX (I copied the text into a different column in the database, and checked in the application that uses this database, and it is "NXS"). Obviously, the application seems to know how to translate this text. I'm wondering, is this an encoding issue? Is it fixable such that I can view the text? Or, possibly, is this some method of encrypting the text?

I'm just hoping someone has encountered this before, knows what's up and how to fix it.