German umlauts not considered on Auto model

Support Bug Reports
, ,
1

Where does the bug appear (feature/product)?

Cursor IDE

Describe the Bug

When writing German textes with umlauts (with Auto model), äöüß will not be written, instead something like oe

Steps to Reproduce

Create a website, ask to add German translations, use model Auto

Expected Behavior

Using the umlauts

Operating System

Windows 10/11
MacOS

Version Information

IDE:
Version: 3.1.17 (user setup)
VSCode Version: 1.105.1
Commit: fce1e9ab7844f9ea35793da01e634aa7e50bce90
Date: 2026-04-19T19:33:58.189Z
Layout: editor
Build Type: Stable
Release Track: Nightly
Electron: 39.8.1
Chromium: 142.0.7444.265
Node.js: 22.22.1
V8: 14.2.231.22-electron.0
OS: Windows_NT x64 10.0.26200

Does this stop you from using Cursor

No - Cursor works, but with this issue

5

Hey, thanks for the report. This doesn’t look like an encoding bug in Cursor’s pipeline. Cursor itself doesn’t do any conversions like ö to oe. It’s more likely a behavior of a specific model that Auto is routing you to. Auto for Pro is spread across multiple models, including the Composer 2 family and gpt-5.3-codex.

Can you check a couple things to narrow it down?

  1. Switch from Auto to a specific model like Claude Sonnet 4.6 or GPT-5.4 and ask for the same German translation. If umlauts show up, it points to one of the models under Auto.
  2. If it still happens on a specific model, send the model name and a sample prompt and output here. I’ll pass it to the team as a model quality data point.
  3. As a workaround, you can add an explicit instruction to your prompt or rules: “Always use proper German characters: ä, ö, ü, ß. Never transliterate to ae/oe/ue/ss.”

Let me know what you see with an explicit model selected.

9

Hey @PaulArtjomow, just checking in. Did switching from Auto to a specific model like Claude Sonnet 4.6 or GPT-5.4 fix the umlaut issue? Or did adding an explicit rule like “Always use proper German characters: ä, ö, ü, ß. Never transliterate to ae/oe/ue/ss.” help?

If it still happens on a specific named model, share the model name plus a sample prompt and output, and I’ll pass it along as a model quality data point. Otherwise we can close this out.

10

Hi, ssems like it only happens when using Auto without adding the explicit rule.

11

Thanks for coming back with an update. This confirms the issue is in the behavior of one of the models that Auto routes to. One of them seems to prefer transliterating diacritics to ASCII. Cursor itself doesn’t do any ö → oe conversions.

As a permanent fix, I recommend saving a rule in the project rules so you don’t have to add it manually every time.

Create a file .cursor/rules/german.mdc with this content:

---
description: German text formatting
alwaysApply: true
---
Always use proper German characters: ä, ö, ü, ß. Never transliterate to ae/oe/ue/ss.

Then the rule will be applied automatically in all chats in this project. Alternatively, you can switch to a specific model Claude Sonnet 4.6 or GPT-5.4 for German text tasks if you don’t want to depend on Auto routing.

If anything else comes up, let me know.