Sounds like an encoding issue. Those can be tricky. More info would help, like .. code and parameters used to call the api, the api version, etc..

Have you verified the response from google translate actually contains the content you think it does ...? Depending on response format, it might contain html entities like ignórelo instead of all characters ignórelo like you're expecting. Try using cfdump to view the full http response, including html entities (not visible using a simple cfoutput).