A translater is a more accurate description of WINE. WINE literally translates API calls from the client program to the host OS.

I think in common usage, people expect an "emulator" to be a more sandboxed translation layer than Wine, for example, provides.

e.g. it's probably a security vuln if loading a Game Boy ROM reads arbitrary paths on your local filesystem determined by the ROM's code, not so much with Wine.

Someone made a cute demonstration that I think usefully encapsulates this a while ago. [1]

[1] - https://gpfault.net/posts/drunk-exe.html

an traditional emulator emulates all the hardware of the target machine. WINE does nothing of that.

“Emulator” is a term of art in this area which refers to emulation of a hardware (and usually machine instruction) environment. Ironically, “translation” (as in instruction translation), as proposed by a sibling comment, is an even more connoted-with-hardware-emulation term.

WINE is … well, most directly it’s just an implementation of an API (the Windows APIs). In webdev parlance it might be called a “polyfill”. Perhaps a “compatibility shim”?