diff --git a/snowball.cabal b/snowball.cabal
--- a/snowball.cabal
+++ b/snowball.cabal
@@ -1,5 +1,5 @@
 name          : snowball
-version       : 0.1.0
+version       : 0.1.0.1
 homepage      : http://hub.darcs.net/dag/snowball
 category      : Natural Language Processing, Text
 maintainer    : dag.odenhall@gmail.com
@@ -8,9 +8,7 @@
 description   : The Snowball library is used to compute the stems of words
                 in natural languages.
                 .
-                Compared to the older
-                <http://hackage.haskell.org/package/stemmer stemmer>
-                package, this one:
+                Compared to the older <stemmer> package, this one:
                 .
                 * Correctly handles unicode without relying on the system
                   locale
diff --git a/src/Text/Snowball.hs b/src/Text/Snowball.hs
--- a/src/Text/Snowball.hs
+++ b/src/Text/Snowball.hs
@@ -16,7 +16,7 @@
                                         packCStringLen, useAsCString)
 import           Data.Text             (Text)
 import qualified Data.Text             as Text
-import           Data.Text.Encoding    (decodeUtf8, encodeUtf8)
+import           Data.Text.Encoding    (decodeUtf8', encodeUtf8)
 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 import           Foreign               (Ptr)
 import           Foreign.C             (CInt (..), CString)
@@ -59,7 +59,7 @@
           do ptr <- sb_stemmer_stem stemmer word' (fromIntegral $ Text.length word)
              len <- sb_stemmer_length stemmer
              bytes <- packCStringLen (ptr,fromIntegral len)
-             return $ decodeUtf8 bytes
+             return $ either (const word) id $ decodeUtf8' bytes
 
 {-# RULES "map/stem" forall a xs. map (stem a) xs = stems a xs #-}