Webservices & Babelfish Error

I'm just starting to play around with webservices and an AJAX call to a cfc and have run into an issue with babelfish which appears to be a bug with the service but I'm wondering if it's an issue with something i'm doing wrong

This bit works
<cfset transstring = "My text. To provide many people an opportunity to try some food and have some fun. Those with ears will like it too. Another friend wanted some things and I"

but
<cfset transstring = "My text. To provide many people an opportunity to try some food and have some fun. Those with ears will like it too. Another friend wanted some things and I thought"

fails because the first occurrence of an accent character returned is in pensé the translation of the last word "thought".

length of the text doesn't seem to matter

<cfset transstring = "i would like to go swimming in the pool"> works

<cfset transstring = "i would like to go swimming in the summer"> fails (été)  



the error returned is

"    Could not perform web service invocation "BabelFish".
 Here is the fault returned when invoking the web service operation:

AxisFault

 faultCode: {http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/}Server.userException
 faultSubcode:
 faultString: java.io.UTFDataFormatException: Invalid byte 2 of 3-byte UTF-8 sequence.
 faultActor:
 faultNode:
 faultDetail:
      {http://xml.apache.org/axis/}stackTrace:java.io.UTFDataFormatException: Invalid byte 2 of 3-byte UTF-8 sequence.
      at org.apache.xerces.impl.io.UTF8Reader.invalidByte(Unknown Source)
      at org.apache.xerces.impl.io.UTF8Reader.read(Unknown Source)
      at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLEntityScanner.load(Unknown Source)
      at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLEntityScanner.scanContent(Unknown Source)
      at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanContent(Unknown Source)
      at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl$FragmentContentDispatcher.dispatch(Unknown Source)
      at org.apache.xerces.impl.XMLDocumentFragmentScannerImpl.scanDocument(Unknown Source)
      at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configuration.parse(Unknown Source)
      at org.apache.xerces.parsers.XML11Configu... </pre>


the code in the cfc is

<cfinvoke
  webservice = "http://www.xmethods.net/sd/2001/BabelFishService.wsdl"
  method = "BabelFish"
  returnVariable = "translated">

<cfinvokeargument name="translationmode" value="en_fr" />
<cfinvokeargument name="sourcedata" value="#transstring#" />
</cfinvoke>

ca anyone replicate this...

anyone have any workarounds if it is a bug...