Interestingly I observed something similar with Google Translate as a learner of German.
So, by way of background, there is a long-standing convention in German that if you can't represent umlauts for whatever reason, you write the letter 'e' after the vowel to show that it should have had an umlaut on it. I got pretty used to the fact, over the years, that Google search perfectly understands this convention, and that I can perform searches of the German web using this convention with no loss of funcionality (which is convenient since on many systems umlauts are hard to type with a UK or US keyboard layout).
When I started using Google Translate as a convenient way to look up words or phrases I naturally assumed that it would, similarly, understand the convention. In fact, I discovered that I often got poorer (and sometimes very bizarre) translations if I used the 'e' conventikon rather than typing the actual umlaut. Of course, this makes sense. The 'e' spellings would be very rare in the corpusus that the machine learning algorithms were trained on, so using that spelling gave pretty random results.
I *think* they may have fixed this now..... Hopefully....
Biting the hand that feeds IT
