Confirmed, I have reproduction steps.
I was attempting to mod the name list earlier, so I created the attached template by deleting (most of) the names from one of the official ones.
I then load this into the game, run through the create species screen and get the following result:
As you see here, my ship names include the equals character and some strings associated with things that definitely aren't ships.
What seems to be happening here is that the game parses this file partly incorrectly, maybe it is not seeing a close-brace or something. Or maybe there is a problem with the file (but it's your file, I just deleted strings, so...)
This is somewhat unlikely to happen just because most of the files have a lot of names in them. But if you remove the names, it happens every time.