GNATS help needed

Hi,

i am trying to customize and translate GNATS to have a German User Interface. 
After serveral good iterations i'am stuck - since i've changed the field "Closed-Date" 
send-pr won't do anything anymore and gnatsweb returns "unparseable reply from gnatsd:" (without a reply)
in the directory gnats-adm a file "gnats.lock" is created. I've undone my changes but get still the same result.  

1. What can i do to recover. 
2. Is a translation generally possible (may be there are hardcoded fieldnames, etc)


many thanks in advance

Hans-Jörg Leu