[kergonath]

“an emulator is hardware or software that enables one computer system (called the host) to behave like another computer system” (Wikipedia).

This is not the case for Rosetta 2, which does a translation pass before running the generated ARM binary. No x86 code is run.

[icedchai]

I'd argue that "translation" is an implementation detail of emulation. Your translated app still thinks it is x86-64 (witnessed by running "uname -a" in a Rosetta terminal.)

[userbinator]

That's just the difference between a JIT and not - something like QEMU in the other direction doesn't "run" ARM code either, but in the end it really doesn't matter and is only a minor pedantry.