Will the Indictment Be Translated Into Your Language? What a Turkish court translates, and what it does not

The document is the iddianame. Under CMK 170/2 the prosecutor issues it where the evidence collected forms sufficient suspicion that an offence has been committed. The court then has fifteen days from receiving it to accept or return it, and an indictment not returned within that period is deemed accepted (CMK 174). Once it is accepted, CMK 176/1 provides that it is served on the defendant together with the summons. In Turkish.

No provision obliges anyone to render it into your language on paper. The interpreter right in CMK 202 is a right to interpretation of speech, not to a translated file. CMK 202/1 draws the line narrowly: where a defendant does not know Turkish well enough to express what they mean, the essential points of the accusation and of the defence at the hearing are translated through a court-appointed interpreter. The indictment itself, the hearing record, expert reports and the judgment all stay in Turkish.

What you are entitled to hear is set out in CMK 191/3-b: at the opening of the trial the acts and evidence on which the accusation rests, and its legal characterisation, are explained. CMK 191/3-c then requires that the right to silence and the other CMK 147 rights be notified. That spoken explanation is what your interpreter renders. It is a summary of a document, delivered once, in a room where several other things are happening.

CMK 176/4 requires at least one week between service of the indictment and the date of the hearing. That week is the only preparation period the Code gives you against the document, and for a foreign defendant it is the week in which the translation has to happen — privately, or not at all.

If you are held on remand, the indictment reaches you in the prison, in Turkish, and you have no way of reading it yourself. The practical answer is not to wait for the courtroom: give the file number to your lawyer and ask for the accusation section and the list of evidence to be read to you before the hearing, not at it. The same document also governs how your detention is being justified, and how remand is reviewed and challenged is set out on the remand and judicial control page.

CMK 202/4 gives a defendant one thing at this precise moment, and it is worth knowing what it is and what it is not. After the indictment has been explained, you may give your oral defence in another language you state you can express yourself better in, through an interpreter you choose from the annual provincial list. The Code says in terms that these costs are not met by the Treasury. It is a facility for speaking, not for reading.

An indictment in a drug, fraud or smuggling file frequently runs to twenty or thirty pages: dates, telephone records, the acts attributed to each defendant separately, the provisions relied on. What is explained at the opening under CMK 191/3-b is the substance of it. What your interpreter conveys is that explanation, filtered a second time.

Two losses are common, and both are recoverable only at the time.

Which acts are attributed to you

In a multi-defendant file the explanation covers the accusation as a whole. A defendant who leaves the first hearing knowing there is a drug charge, but not which specific journey, telephone number or transfer is said to be his, cannot prepare a defence to it. Ask, through the interpreter, that the acts attributed to you personally be stated. It is a question about the content of the indictment, and it is a proper one.

The legal characterisation

CMK 191/3-b expressly includes the legal characterisation, and it is the part most often compressed into a single word in interpretation. The difference between possession for personal use and trafficking, or between fraud and its aggravated form, is the difference between two very different sentencing ranges. Ask which article is charged, and have the answer recorded.

Recording is the whole of it. CMK 221 lists what the duruşma tutanağı must contain: the name and surname of the interpreter, the elements showing that the fundamental rules of procedure were observed, the defendant's statements, and requests together with the reasons where a request is refused. A stated inability to follow the explanation, or a request that the accusation be put again more slowly, therefore belongs in the record. A year later, an objection that is in the tutanak is a fact; an objection that is not is a claim, and the file will read as though you understood.

The indictment is not always where the case ends up. Under CMK 226 the court may convict under a provision other than the one charged, but only where the defendant has been notified of the change in advance and placed in a position to answer it — and, on request, given time to prepare that additional defence.

For a foreign defendant this is one of the more useful provisions in the Code, and it is regularly not used, because the change is announced in Turkish, summarised in one sentence by the interpreter, and passes before anyone reacts. The request for time has to be made, and it has to be minuted under CMK 221. CMK 202/4 also opens a second time here: after the prosecutor delivers the opinion on the merits, the oral defence may again be given in another language through an interpreter you choose.

Where the accusation was never properly conveyed and the objection is on the file, the point is capable of being carried further. CMK 289 lists violations treated as absolute even where the petition does not raise them, among them restriction of the right of defence by a decision of the court on matters important for the judgment (289/1-h). What that argument needs is not eloquence at the appeal stage but a line in a hearing record written months earlier. Where the remedies run, and by when, is set out on the appeals page.

The rest of the picture — who appoints the interpreter and who pays, how the annual provincial lists are drawn up and what qualifications they actually require, what happens when no interpreter for your language exists, and why a bilingual relative at a police station is not an interpreter within the meaning of CMK 202 — is set out on the practice area page on interpreters and the language your case is run in.