We agree that the overall behavior is not as desired.
I didn’t mean at all that the developper made a mistake.
A bug may be also an integration bug (good definition found here, matching our case), between iNaturalist and Google.
My opinion is that the overall process should be robust against Google’s replacement of “china” by “chine” on the fly. A possibility is that iNaturalist should overwrite the unexpected “chine” returned by Google with “china”, after the item initially displayed in the drop down list, and selected manually.
Also to be checked: is there a way to explicitely tell Google which language is being used (the language in the iNaturalist user’s profile)? This could help in another case, when, as a French user, I deliberately enter and then select “Chine”.
If the page is likely to be reworked, let’s just wait for the next major edition of iNaturalist.