Living the last several years as an ex-pat, I can at least attest that one tends to lean towards using expressions and words that are easy to understand or even slanted towards expressions that are translations of expressions in the target language instead of native expressions or word choices. One sort of subconsciously also starts to repeat the typical English mistakes that non-native speakers use when speaking English to you, which is bad because it reinforces their mistakes but it's hard to avoid. (E.g. like dropping articles or pronouns.)
And yes, I do the same when using Google Translate, I will very often write things in English in a way that I know will translate better to the target language, similarly to how I will write a search query using words that I think will be more likely to return useful results even if they aren't completely "natural". I just consider it part of a skill of knowing how to use automatic translation to my benefit. You literally learned to be "skilled" at using something that's supposed to be auto-adaptive, which is interesting in itself. To start to learn and adapt to its dynamics. This is also interesting just for the fact that I have learned to depend on automatic translation as a way of living. Many things related to living abroad would not have been as easy or even possible without the help of Google Translate, despite having learned the language colloquially.
About five years back I had to do a good deal of communication with the aide of Google Translate. I would frequently copy what I wrote into Google Translate, then copy the result into another tab to translate back to English. I found that if the text could make a round trip without loosing anything important, then it could be understood.
Also mimicking the way non-native speakers pronounce words is useful. You can get very very far with English in Thailand in almost every situation if you know how to Thai-ify words (Apple -> Ah-Poon, Stereo -> Sah-teh-lee-oh" for example)
It get extra interesting when you learn to read Thai script, you can really see how they have tried to write the English words in Thai script and how the Thai speech/reading rules "breaks" the word.
For example Apple, in Thai it is written แอปเปิ้ล with each Thai character trying to be 1:1, for example แอ=ae ป=p (loosely). The interesting part is at the end, ล this character on its own is generally pronounced as an L. So for the English word, they put the L at the end to make the word apple. But - in Thai, characters have different sounds depending on their locations, ล is pronounced N when it is placed at the end of a syllable - so "apple" in Thai is generally pronounced "appen" instead.
And yes, I do the same when using Google Translate, I will very often write things in English in a way that I know will translate better to the target language, similarly to how I will write a search query using words that I think will be more likely to return useful results even if they aren't completely "natural". I just consider it part of a skill of knowing how to use automatic translation to my benefit. You literally learned to be "skilled" at using something that's supposed to be auto-adaptive, which is interesting in itself. To start to learn and adapt to its dynamics. This is also interesting just for the fact that I have learned to depend on automatic translation as a way of living. Many things related to living abroad would not have been as easy or even possible without the help of Google Translate, despite having learned the language colloquially.