How to retain perl in-house code

[basicdez]

I just found out that the job that I am currently consulting in is having me disect the existing perl scripts (which are not bad) and document them so that they can write transformation documents in another language, thus going away from perl. I am sad, and wondered if any of you might have some advice to help me to possibly get these guys to keep the perl idea going here.

Perl could simply do what they want, it is just that the existing code was written rather complicated and confusing and with no documentation written with it, it has given perl a bad rap.

I don't want to make to many waves as I have to pay my bills and as we all know consulting does not allow for a lot of leverage in changing minds, as I am the outsider, but I just thought that several of you have experience in this, so help me out, and maybe you can give me a direction to go into that would help to retain the in-house perl code, granted it would need a lot of updating, but that is okay, who doesn't want to improve existing code?

UPDATE : I am grateful for all of this great advice. I will take it to heart and should they decide to re-write everything, I will do my best to maintain some perl, as that is where my heart is.