Través — in the classic phrase, a través de (“going through”) — comes from the Latin transversus, which is just the prefix trans- (“through”) with vertere (“to turn”).
Here is where it gets interesting. From the same root vertere, we get all of the vert- English words, such as: convert, invert, divert, vertebrae. All do involve turning, in one form or another.
This one doesn’t have a mapping that is easy, since only the v- survives, since the trans- lost the ‑ns- and the r‑t-r of vertere disappeared, leaving us with just… v. But we should remember that the v‑, and much more often the v‑r or v‑r-t is just that something is turning, converting into something else.
