Green’s Dictionary of Slang

(US campus) a translation, a study aid.

1893		W.K. Post Harvard Stories 235: The mucker was put in the middle of the room with the ‘trot’; the students sat around him.
1900		E.H. Babbitt ‘College Words and Phrases’ in DN II:i 68: trot, n. A translation.
1900		Lincs. Echo 22 Nov. 2/4: In an article on college slang in the United States [...] translations [...] are not only ‘cribs’ but ‘bicycles’, ‘horses,’ ‘trots,’ and ‘ponies’ — in short something that gets you there quickly.
1924		P. Marks Plastic Age 298–9: I know that the majority of the fellows don’t consciously cheat; I’m talking about the copying of math problems and the using of trots.
1936		(con. 1920s) Dos Passos Big Money in USA (1966) 851: I go home [...] and read (with some difficulty in the Loeb Library trot) the epigrams of Martial.
1941		C.O. Skinner Soap Behind the Ears 40: The next is a literal translation, nostalgically reminiscent of my old Horace trot [DA].
1967–8		Baker et al. CUSS.
1996		Eble Sl. and Sociability 16: A striking example from college slang is the apparent loss of the most pervasive set of college slang items of the nineteenth century, words conveying the image of traveling the easy way — that is, being carried by a horse or pony — to refer to using a translation for Latin class. In the days when Latin was a required subject in British and American schools, pony, horse, and trot were widely known slang terms for ‘a literal translation.’.