Although, The term "trans-linear" was firstly coined by Barrie Gilbert in his first published paper "Translinear Circuits: A Proposed Classification" in Electronics Letters 1975, it can be said that MOS translinear principle was extended and well-developed by Remco J. Wiegerink that you can look for more detail in his book "Analysis and Synthesis of MOS Translinear Circuits."
Its advantage is similar to its predecessor, bipolar, that you can analyse and synthesis a plethora of useful nonlinear circuits, including wideband analog multipliers, current conveyors, frequency multipliers, operational current amplifiers, RMS–DC converters, and vector-magnitude circuits in the well-established domain of linear-circuit design.