Garbled man pages in Linux?

I use the putty windows client to connect to my linux boxes and always run into this problem:

>man sort

NAME
sort â sort lines of text files
SYNOPSIS
sort [OPTION]... [FILE]...
DESCRIPTION
Write sorted concatenation of all FILE(s) to standard output.
Ordering options:

Mandatory arguments to long options are mandatory for short options
too.
âb, ââignoreâleadingâblanks ignore leading blanks
âd, ââdictionaryâorder
consider only blanks and alphanumeric characters
âf, ââignoreâcase
fold lower case to upper case characters


Luckily there is an easy fix:

export LANG="en_US"

I don't know why Fedora sets the LANG variable to something that breaks your terminal.