The German translation in source/po/de.msg is broken. This File contains special german chars ("Umlaute") in the translation for web/swat.c -File. SWAT creates a HTML-3.2-Document and so this chars must be recoded, for instance ä=ä and so on. This mistake make SWAT unuseable in german language.
Created attachment 754 [details] new german translation file
Thanks for reporting, but this already has been fixed in samba 3.0.8pre2 by Björn Jacke. You could try that prerelease or wait for 3.0.8. Please reopen if it still does not work for you.
This bug is NOT fixed in 3.0.8pre2 The problem is: SWAT use HTML-3.2. The german translation file by Björn Jacke use the special german chars in UTF-8. This works for console programs such smbpasswd and so on. For the web frontend you can use UTF-8 only with HTML-4.0. This means, that one way to fix the problem is using HTML-4.0 in SWAT. The other way is recoding the chars to HTML-3.2. The other problem: some of the translations are nuts. The translation does not mean the right thing. I attach a patch I used for samba-3.0.7 and 3.1.0
Created attachment 757 [details] Patch for german translation
do you use a browser with utf-8 suppoert or ancient netscape 4.x versions? If you use a utf-8 capable browser it will work probably. The used charset in html is always utf-8 now and the msg files should also be utf-8 encoded, also mentioned in the new docs. This is not an issue of html4 or html3. Of course if you use entities you can work around broken utf-8 support in browsers but that's not the way to go.
The problem is always shown in Mozilla -1.7 Internet Explorer 6 Konqueror 3.3 The entity-Version works fine with all browsers
I double checked it worked correct also with IE. You should clean up your environment. You have most probably rotten swat include files on your disk.