Can You Bring Your Own Interpreter to a Turkish Hearing, and who pays for the court's one?

Turkish criminal procedure holds two separate interpreter provisions, and treating them as one is the most expensive mistake a family makes.

The first belongs to the court. CMK 202/1 sets a single threshold: whether a defendant or a victim knows Turkish well enough to express what they mean — meramını anlatabilecek ölçüde. Below it, the essential points of the accusation and of the defence at the hearing are translated through an interpreter appointed by the court. CMK 202/3 carries the same rule into the investigation stage, for a suspect, victim or witness heard before trial; there the interpreter is appointed by the judge or by the public prosecutor. You do not apply for this, you do not pick the person, and you are not charged for it.

The second belongs to you, and it was added later. CMK 202/4 was inserted on 24 January 2013 by Law no. 6411. It lets a defendant give his oral defence in another language he states he can express himself better in, through an interpreter he selects himself — and the paragraph says in terms that the costs of that interpreter are not met by the State Treasury.

So the answer to the question is: yes, at two specific moments, for one specific purpose, from a specific list, at your own expense. Everything else that happens in that courtroom runs through the court's interpreter.

CMK 202/4 attaches the right to exactly two points in the trial:

• on the explanation of the indictment, at the opening of the trial;
• on the delivery of the prosecutor's opinion on the merits — esas hakkındaki mütalaa — near the end of it.

Four limits follow from the wording, and each of them disappoints somebody.

It is your own oral defence only. Not the questioning of witnesses, not your lawyer's submissions, not a running translation of what everyone else in the room is saying. All of that stays with the court's appointee under CMK 202/1.

It is not free. The paragraph states plainly that the costs of this interpreter are not borne by the Treasury. It is the only interpreter in the Code that you pay for.

The person must still come from the list. You choose, but you choose from the annual list drawn up by the province's il adlî yargı adalet komisyonu under CMK 202/5 — the same source the court itself draws on. Judges and prosecutors may also take names from lists made in other provinces, and under Article 11 of the 2013 Regulation a copy of each year's sworn list goes to the Ministry of Justice by 31 December. A friend, a spouse, an employer's translator or a consular officer is not on that list, and selecting them is not an option the paragraph offers.

It cannot be used to slow the case down. CMK 202/4 states that the facility may not be abused to leave the proceedings hanging, and Article 13 of the Regulation repeats it. A request made for the first time on the day of the final hearing, in a language never mentioned in the eighteen months before it, is what that sentence was written for.

CMK 324/1 defines yargılama giderleri: court fees, the advocacy fees payable under the scale, every expense made from the State Treasury for the conduct of the investigation and the prosecution, and the payments made by the parties. CMK 324/2 requires the judgment to state who is to bear them, and CMK 324/3 leaves the amounts to the presiding judge.

Those costs land somewhere, and on conviction they land on the defendant. CMK 325/1 provides that where a person is sentenced to a penalty or to a security measure, all trial costs are placed on him. CMK 325/2 applies the same rule where the verdict is deferred (HAGB) or the sentence is suspended — two outcomes foreign defendants often read as a clean escape, and which still carry a bill.

The interpreter is the exception, and it is a clean one. CMK 324/5 provides that the costs of an interpreter assigned for a suspect, defendant, victim or witness who does not know Turkish, or who is disabled, are not counted as trial costs at all and are met by the State Treasury. Article 12/1 of the 2013 Regulation repeats it in the same words. Because the item never enters the category, CMK 325 has nothing to operate on. A convicted defendant is not billed afterwards for the interpreter who sat beside him for two years.

Article 12/2 of the Regulation sets out the mechanics on the paid side. Where a defendant selects an interpreter from the commission lists under CMK 202/4, the cost is not met by the Treasury, and the court fixes both the fee and the period within which it is to be paid into the court cash office. There is no figure in the text and no fixed deadline; both are set case by case. What does not change is the consequence of not paying it: your entitlement under CMK 202/1 and 202/3 is untouched, and the court's own interpreter stays.

Which is the practical point. If the interpretation you are getting is thin, the answer is not to hire someone. It is to make the problem appear on the face of the file while the hearing is still running. CMK 221/1-a requires the hearing minutes to carry the name and surname of the interpreter. CMK 221/1-g requires requests, and the reasons where a request is refused, to be recorded. CMK 222 then provides that how a hearing was conducted can be proved only by the minutes, and that nothing but an allegation of forgery may be raised against them.

Read together, those three provisions mean that an objection which was not minuted did not, in evidential terms, happen. A defendant who says nothing across four hearings and then argues on istinaf that he never understood the proceedings is arguing against a tutanak that records no such complaint. The place to say that a question was not understood and should be put again is the moment it is asked, and the thing to ask for is that the request, and the answer to it, go into the record.

Where the language problem started earlier — at the police station rather than in the courtroom — the analysis runs differently. The interpreter rights page sets out how the right operates from the first statement onwards, how much of a hearing is actually translated, and what is never translated in writing at all.