Comment by delusional

I think that's how it started out, and also how a lot of developers still conceptualize it. Wine has had to massively expand that scope to reach the maturity it has now. I think it's kind of straddling the line between "Implementation" and "translation".

Philosophically its still a translation layer though. It doesn't really care about correctness if the no apps depend on it. Success is in meaningfully running client software. The implementation of the Windows Libraries are just a way to get there.