I would start by posting a bug ticket to that endpoint for being poorly behaved! It seems like it should always return an array, even if it is a single error.
If the response is being returned to Architect I would probably handle this special case there, as it has JSON tooling that can attempt both the single response and array response. While cleaning this up in a data action might be possible, it is going to be some pretty ugly string manipulation.
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--Jason
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