What Unidecode provides is a function, 'unidecode(...)' that takes Unicode data and tries to represent it in ASCII characters (i.e., the universally displayable characters between 0x00 and 0x7F). The representation is almost always an attempt at *transliteration* -- i.e., conveying, in Roman letters, the pronunciation expressed by the text in some other writing system. (See the example above) WWW: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/Unidecode