Despite the variation in meaning, I think what ‘transpiler’ means locally to a particular technology group is usually well understood by its community. For exam

Despite the variation in meaning, I think what ‘transpiler’ means locally to a particular technology group is usually well understood by its community. For example, if you’re a JavaScript developer and someone mentions a transpiler, I think it’s safe to say you immediately think of something like Babel (although interestingly, it describes itself as a compiler) and it’s generally well understood that it means a tool that takes either a JavaScript alternative or currently browser-unsupported JS and builds something that a wide range of browsers support. Is local understanding good enough? I’d say probably, because if you’re unsure what a particular transpiler does, you could just research that particular tool. And, in the case of JavaScript at least, when you’re in deep enough to learn about transpilers and build systems, the myriad tools available for slightly different approaches to the same job is probably more of a concern than the generic word used to describe them.