❯ echo "какой-то текст" | iconv -f utf-8 -t ascii//TRANSLIT
?????-?? ?????
Please note that iconv('UTF-8', 'ASCII//TRANSLIT', ...) doesn't work properly when locale category LC_CTYPE is set to C or POSIX. You must choose another locale otherwise all non-ASCII characters will be replaced with question marks. This is at least true with glibc 2.5.