Translingual Phonetic Encoding of Words
In a nutshell... the TransMetaphone package implements the DoubleMetaphone algorithm for 10 different languages where keys are generated in IPA symbols (more than 2 keys may in fact be generated). The usefulness of which is that you can then compare words (presumably phonetically transcribed proper nouns) across language and script boundaries. Applied to text retrieval, you can generate a key in one language and then search for it any other supported language.
Such is the goal, an extended description is provided in the doc/index.html file. See also the doc/KeyTable.html file, which is not perfect but not too far off either.