Apart from some pretty deplorable driving standards, this is a pretty law abiding country. All the same the police reports sometimes make interesting reading. In part down to the pleasures of translation. Suspect that some bits of quaintness don’t appear in the original.
So we read that “A 30-year-old man stabbed a person with whom he had a previous enmity in Akdoğan”. The press release continues “…M.M. (M-30) entered the house of İD. (M-35), with whom he had a previous feud, without permission and ravaged the property, then with a knife he had illegally in his possession, he superficially injured İD. in the fingers of his left hand, ribcage, left shoulder and abdomen”.
It is standard practice in reporting police news to provide the initials of those involved as well as gender and age. Actual names not usually included, although Akdoğan is a community of about 2500 and there will be no one who lives there and remains unaware of all the gory details. Much as it is in small Canadian communities.
And then there’s “a drunk person who caused a disturbance by shouting and yelling loudly” who was arrested. This apparently in our quiet village - which is sprawling rather than tiny. İMY (M-26), who was under the influence of 234 ml of alcohol, behaved in a public place in a manner that was against honour and morality by urinating, and caused a disturbance by shouting and yelling loudly.”
The Turkish keyboard is not quite the same as the standard English one. Used to really annoy me years ago in the days of internet cafés when, being accustomed to touch typing, I would look up and see that what I thought I had typed was not what appeared on the screen. The reason of course is that the alphabet is not precisely the same. There are 29 letters - and in fact in November Turkish President Erdoğan announced an intention to add five more. More or less daring than renaming the Gulf of Mexico? So now, with several keyboards installed on my tablet the ever-helpful predictive text is kept on its toes trying to guess. In fairness to the translator, the grammatical structure is not the same as English either. Some words will have various possible meanings, although one does wonder whether in Turkish it is possible to shout and yell other than loudly.
But do kind of like the old-fashioned appeal to honour and morality.
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