Ruby 1.8 displays non-ascii characters in the shell using octal escape sequences. \302\277 is ¿, \303\263 is ó and so forth. It should be fine to work with (eg, saving to a database or displaying in a template) as long as you know the encoding. I just glanced at the code, but it looks like it just takes whatever the Google Translate API gives it, which I'm guessing is UTF-8.