The tensip tutanağı is the first order a Turkish civil court makes after an action is filed: the judge takes up the file and sets the first steps of the proceedings. When a foreign party receives it in translation, the first question is whether it is a decision or the record of a meeting. The Turkish word tutanak points to the second; the document does the first, and the English name follows what the document does.
A document of the Regulation, not the Code
The word tensip does not appear in the Code of Civil Procedure. The document rests on Article 200(1) of the Registry Services Regulation: after an action is filed, at the start of the written stage, a tensip tutanağı is drawn up for every file. Its heading gives the name of the court and, where the court sits in more than one capacity, the capacity in which it acts, then the names and registration numbers of the judge and the clerk and the identities of the parties. The items that follow are for the judge to choose: whether the statement of claim meets HMK Article 119, the type of action, the procedure that applies, service of the pleadings, evidence and advances, whether the preliminary examination will be held at a hearing, and when a day will be set for the evidence hearing. After it, the necessary decisions are taken at each stage (Article 200(2)). The regulation that governed these matters from 2012 was repealed by Article 262, so a translator’s note citing a legal basis cites Article 200.
Preliminary directions order
The suggested rendering is “preliminary directions order (tensip tutanağı)”. In English civil procedure “directions” is a familiar word for the court’s instructions on how a case is to proceed, which is what the numbered items contain, and “order” tells the reader that a judge made them. “Minutes” is the rendering to avoid. The tensip tutanağı records no hearing; it lists instructions given on the file, and “minutes of the tensip” can lead a reader to think a hearing took place in their absence. Renderings taken from the everyday sense of tensip, such as “approval”, describe nothing in the document: it approves nothing, it sets the first steps.
Two preliminary documents
After the written stage a second document with a similar name enters the file: the record of the preliminary examination. It is drawn up at the end of a hearing, records the points on which the parties disagree and is signed at the foot by the parties present (HMK Article 140(3)); the Regulation lists its contents separately (Article 201(1)). For that document “minutes” is right: “minutes of the preliminary examination hearing”. As both documents carry “preliminary” in English, the noun keeps them apart, “order” for the first and “minutes” for the second. A warning written into the tensip also keeps its force: a party that does not produce its documents despite the warning under Article 139 is deemed to have waived reliance on that evidence (Article 140(5)), and the English renders a statutory consequence, not a reminder.
The heading and the court’s capacity
Because the heading may state the capacity in which the court sits, one line can name a court acting in the capacity of another, for example a civil court acting as a family court. The translation keeps both names in the order the heading gives them and does not reduce them to the capacity alone, so that the reader can match the order with later decisions in the same file.