It often happens that you have non-Roman text data in Unicode, but you can't
 display it -- usually because you're trying to show it to a user via an
 application that doesn't support Unicode, or because the fonts you need
 aren't accessible. You could represent the Unicode characters as "???????" or
 "\15BA\15A0\1610...", but that's nearly useless to the user who actually
 wants to read what the text says.
 .
 What Text::Unidecode provides is a function, unidecode(...) that takes
 Unicode data and tries to represent it in US-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.