I have just as much respect for those who have written a complete transpiler as for those who have built a complete compiler, because, unless the differences be

I have just as much respect for those who have written a complete transpiler as for those who have built a complete compiler, because, unless the differences between the source and target languages are trivial, much of the pipeline is identical. If your target is something like C/JS, your translation stage must be fully aware of the idiosyncrasies of the target language. If you are targeting machine code, you will have to include optimization and register allocation stages before generating machine code and the final executable/library.