actually i think it is unfortunate for a completely different reason: transducers, particularly finite-state transducers, already have a long and rich history in both applied and theoretical computer science; and are currently one of the fundamental building blocks of most NLP and ASR systems in industry and academia.

see http://www.openfst.org and many others.

tacking on some random new etymology, 'transducer is just a combination of transform and reduce', is going to lead to all sorts of unnecessary confusion, made worse by the inherent similarities...