Found the answer on this post:
The tool itself is available on RMS in the RO Tools page. The text in "idnum2itemdesctable.txt" needs to be pre-encoded so that it comes out right when in-game. An old info doc from the RO Translation Project files also mention this (was able to find it be searching for "RagTXTPR" after I found the tool):
... and after the change, the text is all fine (but the file in data folder is gibberish -- and that's expected since it was run thru the tool):
