Installing and upgrading help

Hi Ian,
This behavior is due to the lack of language-localizad strings for that items. It seems that you even lack the standard english pack
Could you check if you have a moodle/lang/ dir full of "de" "en", "es",  "fr" subdirs with language pack php files?

 Usually standard Moodle downloads include a lot of language packs. To install any additional language pack, simply go to http://moodle.org/download/lang/ , download the needed ones and unzip them into moodle/lang

- Enrique -