Similar to issue41525 the generated file seems to contain smart quotes. This is used in help utility of the repl to explore different topics.

git log -G'“' Lib/pydoc_data/topics.py | cat
commit bc1c8af8ef2563802767404c78c8ec6d6a967897
Author: Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl>
Date:   Mon Apr 27 22:44:04 2020 +0200

    Python 3.9.0a6

commit fd757083df79c21eee862e8d89aeefefe45f64a0
Author: Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl>
Date:   Tue Nov 19 12:17:21 2019 +0100

    Python 3.9.0a1

commit aab0e57045f6badaa1404409626545785ef02d62
Author: Łukasz Langa <lukasz@langa.pl>
Date:   Sun Feb 3 14:04:12 2019 +0100

    [pydoc] Regenerate topics for v3.8.0a1

Pydoc uses the backslashreplace error handler for characters not encodable with the output encoding (see issue21398 and issue23374).

$ LC_ALL=uk_UA.koi8-u ./python -c "help('async')"
[...]

[2] A string literal appearing as the first statement in the
    function body is transformed into the function\u2019s "__doc__"
    attribute and therefore the function\u2019s *docstring*.

[3] A string literal appearing as the first statement in the class
    body is transformed into the namespace\u2019s "__doc__" item and
    therefore the class\u2019s *docstring*.


It would be better to replace non-ASCII quotation marks and dashes with corresponding ASCII quotation marks and hyphen-minus if they cannot be encoded. It may be a part of more general feature for transliterating non-ASCII characters to ASCII.

Sorry, my previous response was incomplete and I closed this prematurely. Re-opening.