When you say "resources available to gather the metadata", what exactly do you mean?

Do you mean that someone is going in after you write the transformations in perl and translating that into english? Or are you simply referring to the existing process that perl is replacing?

How are you capturing the metadata about the transformations you are putting the data through? In Informatica, for instance, the transformations are saved in an RDBMS, but still in their code form. If I want english translations for those transformations, I have to do that myself; plus in my Metadata Repository, I want the english explanations from the requirements document that drove the development of the code.

In order for all of that to make sense across anything other than a small company, I need to capture definitions of terms, and who defined the terms and by what authority.

There is also metadata generated by the process of ETL itself: When the last load ran, was it complete, was it successful, how many rows did it load, was it on time, if it wasnt complete why...