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://code.zemanta.com/tsolc/unidecode/