As of today I’m officially the maintainer of the Unidecode package for Emacs. Unidecode provides functions for transliterating Unicode text to ASCII. It’s based on the Unidecode package for Python, which was in turn derived from the Text::Unidecode package for Perl.
I was playing with the package (inspired by a desire to semi-automatically generate article slugs for this blog) and ended up submitting a pull request with some changes to address “TODO” items in the project’s README. The author merged the commits and mentioned that he doesn’t use the package anymore, so I offered to take on maintaining it in case my changes cause any problems.
The MELPA recipe has been updated as of 2018-03-11, so package-install away!
Before you rush off to install it, please note that the MELPA recipe is
currently broken. I submitted a pull request to update it, which
will hopefully be merged soon.