Too bad this thread is so old. OP might like to know that we have words in English too that have two wildly divergent meanings. Look up “periwinkle” for example. It’s a mollusk (a type of little sea snail), and it’s also a common garden flower.
yes the OP did acknowledge that the words vary in meaning …
especially when imported from one language to another.
To this day, a word sounding like “catraz” ( قادوس [qādūs] ) , is an arabic word meaning bucket hopper, like on a water wheel .
Tonycoliveira701 is reporting that there is a portugese word altacraz meaning the flock of seabirds, but it may be a colloquialism…
Its impossible to know which came first, the sea birds being called (al)catraz, or the bucket… because the might have named the bucket after the pelican…
Whats clear is that various large seabird species , eg al-batross and pelican, have names like alcatraz in arabic, spanish and portugese
I’m laughing here…
I went to RAE to see if they had an origin for albatros. Yep, they do: from English albatross and this from Spanish alcatraz 
I’m curious about how “albatross” came to mean “impediment” as in, having “an albatross around one’s neck”.
From Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner epic poem - or see Albatross (metaphor) for more details…and many, many examples.
ETA: Curiously, the poem was published in 1798, but it took much longer to enter the common metaphor lexicon:
This sense is catalogued in the Oxford English Dictionary from 1936 and 1955, but it seems only to have entered general usage in the 1960s, or possibly as early as 1959.
The albatross in the poem was a harbinger of good fortune; the main character killed it and so was required to carry its body hanging from his neck.
For Shackleton, albatrosses were a crucial convenience. When they lost the Endurance and managed to reach Elephant Island, the crew that remained there survived largely on eating albatrosses that roosted there.
And if you’ve read Martin Gardner’s The Annotated Ancient Mariner, or seen a live or stuffed Albatross, you know how absurd the imagery is. Coleridge obviously thought the albatross a much smaller bird (and it is so represented in Gustave Dore’s illustrations)
But the albatross has among the largest wingspans of any birds – up to twelve feet across. Even if you halve that, it’s still six feet. Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner would’ve been dragging its damned wings around the deck if they hung that from his neck.
https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A0LEV1ETyx9XuFwAlUVXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTB0N2Noc21lBGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDBHNlYwNwaXZz?p=Albatross+wingspan&fr=yfp-t-201&fr2=piv-web#id=40&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fc2.staticflickr.com%2F6%2F5296%2F5394894916_c3fa314fe5_z.jpg&action=click
I’ve been a volunteer on Alcatraz Island since 2003. According to the historians on the island, nobody is 100% sure what “alcatraz” really meant. It is documented that the word was “Alcatraces” and later morphed to “Alcatraz,” but then there is some confusion. No one really seems to know if it means “pelican” or “strange bird.” At least that’s according to my colleagues.
Here’s a lesser known tidbit: the English read the map incorrectly when they explored San Francisco Bay. When Juan Manuel de Ayala mapped the Bay, he was so unimpressed with the little island that he ignored it. What is today’s Yerba Buena Island was given the name “Isla de los Alcatraces.” The name was later wrongly attributed to today’s Alcatraz Island.
And Alcatraz really is just a rock in the middle of the Bay and was nicknamed “The Rock” back in the 19th century by the U.S. Army. Most of the soil there was transported from nearby Angel Island.
I love San Francisco.