I don't see how that change improves the informativeness at all. Perhaps what would both be appropriate for --help and satisfy the apparent intent behind your changes, is to add a short paragraph about what active and passive translators are to the "doc" text after the \v, so it appears at the bottom of the --help output. This is still a bit pointless IMHO, since if you don't know the basics of Hurd design like the definitions of active and passive translator, then you really don't want to be using settrans in the first place.
Thanks, Roland
