I apologize for not being clearer – I'm not claiming that they're fundamentally different. My original comment, to that point, agrees with the original article's author: compilers are just mappings to and from programs.

re: transpiler – all I'm saying is that the term arose because people associated compilers with low-level outputs.

In summary, there don't appear to be canonical definitions of compilers as having low-level outputs, but for some reason many speak of them that way.