unwelcome SPAN in text output

I've been trying to prepare a tab-and-newline-delimited load file
for mysql, and am finding my output
file cluttered with unwanted <SPAN> elements! It looks
to me like I am in a twilight zone between text & HTML.

usfr-gc_GeneralConcepts	en	"US GAAP - Commercial and Industrial"
int-ar_AccountantsReport	en	"Accountants Report"

This happens regardless of whether I use Saxon (6.5.2) or the
processor native to Stylus Studio, but not using MSXML3.0.

My code runs as follows...
<?xml version='1.0'?>

<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0"
	xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"

	xmlns:taxo="urn:taxonomy-analysis:xslt"
	xmlns:saxon="http://icl.com/saxon"
	xmlns:msxsl="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt"
	>
	<xsl:output method="text" encoding="UTF-8" indent="no"/>

Thanks for your attention,
Arthur Allen