Maybe i am not understanding well but all this seems just a translation layer to me

Ok, so if it's translating to a reverse engineered API, it's emulation. But if it uses the proprietary documentation and does the same exact translation it....wouldn't be emulation anymore? What part are we saying is being emulated again?

You already don’t need to emulate the entire hardware system like you would with a PS3, but you still require a complex translation layer.

I think this is their point, just worded better. Wine and Proton are not "emulators", but translation layers like you are describing.

Although I have no idea what they are talking about in regards to virtualization - being able to install Linux on a PS5 doesn't get me any closer to running PS5 games on Linux, and I can't even imagine the virtualization headaches to get the PS5 OS running in a VM with enough access to the hardware to not blow chunks (and honestly sounds a lot closer to true hardware emulation than not).

Translation layers and emulators are two very different things though, emulators take foreign machine code and interpret it on/recompile it for the native architecture while translation layers replicate OS and driver layer functionality on a foreign OS/driver environment. Proton is a translation layer, not an emulator. The PS5 can literally run Linix and Steam, it's essentially stock PC hardware, so the environment that needs to be replicated is the PS5 system software, not the hardware layer.

Thanks, I don't use spellcheck features and missed that one.