Personally, I think of transpilation as a subset of compilation. So a transpiler is also a compiler, and a compiler that has a readable language backend can do transpilation, which is a type of compilation.

u/masklinn still asks a good question though: there are tools that act on the source code for both "compilation" and "transpilation" (eg Kotlin), depending on the target platform. They do not distinguish, why should we?

For the same reasons you might ever want a more specific term?

What about assemblers or disassemblers? Given a suitably broad definition of compiler that includes transpilers, are they not also included? Wouldn't the same arguments apply?

> For the same reasons you might ever want a more specific term?

I asked why you might want this here and there's been no answer yet. Having a term for something you don't need or want to know isn't actually useful.

> What about assemblers or disassemblers? Given a suitably broad definition of compiler that includes transpilers, are they not also included? Wouldn't the same arguments apply?

Because these are actually useful qualifier, in the same way that "a C compiler" is a useful qualifier.