' symbol in html 4.01 email newsletter turn into different symbols, what to do?

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
    <head>
    
<title>Butiqs newsletter</title>

Then some internal css follows, the following text in the first table:

<!--Tekst.-->
<table id="inleiding" width="600" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0">
<tr height="30"><td></td></tr>

   <tr>
     <td width="20"></td>
       <td><font size="5">Hi yara,</font></td>
   <td width="20"></td>

</tr>
<tr height="10"><td></td></tr>
 <tr>
  <td width="20"></td>
   <td><font>We are excited to have you as part of our Butiqs’ family and we’d like to keep you in the loop of our progress. So, without further ado, here’s where we are now, 5 months after we kickstarted the project…
</font></td>
  <td width="26"></td>

  </tr>
  <tr height="20"><td></td></tr>
</table>

Now the strange thing is, my text is perfectly normal. Only when I live preview it in my browser I see strange symbols in my text.

Image of the weird symbols

This happens everytime when I use a 'symbol in html. What is the problem? Even when I make it a normal html doctype, the problem stays.

Can someone help me?

Solution

For Html 4.01 you would need to put <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8"> in your head tag.