localToGlobal() and its evil cousin

I have the following objects:

_root.map.transformations.maptiles.spawner
_root.pawns.spawnedobject

The spawner object is having the heck transformed out of it, and the spawned object needs to follow it. I simply haven’t managed to get a handle on localToGlobal() or its friend globalToLocal(). Documentation and tutorials haven’t made things clearer, as neither of these work as I expect them to.

What I’ve found is that if I do localToGlobal inside the spawner in the form of:

this.localToGlobal()

…I can use the resulting coordinates to place the spawned object correctly. I expected to need to use:

_root.pawns.globalToLocal()

…on those results to get the final location, but using it actually misplaced the spawned object. So I didn’t use this function at all.

Now an object in a third path is breaking. The path is:

 _root.map.transformations.tileanimation.newspawnedobject

I can see where I’m going wrong, but I can’t see what I should be doing to get this working correctly. Any advice/examples?