For crying out loud.....it is quite clear which door Gerry was referring to when he said he entered using his key because it was locked....the front door/north door/brown wooden door/the door with the big round handle...it so obviously was NOT the patio door which HAS NO KEY to enter with!
No translation errors whatsoever!
I don't think that a
translation error is likely, either. However, there could easily have been confusion between a description of the apartment and which door was front or back.
I would find it quite extraordinary if the first witness (just hours after the event) wouldn't have been asked to give a general layout of the flat (but that doesn't appear in the statement, quite possibly because it wasn't verbatim). The easiest thing for both the police officer and the interpreter would be to make a quick sketch (as scribbled notes
or mentally) so that they could follow what Gerry was saying. If one or the other had already noted that the front door required a key, it really isn't that difficult to get mixed up between front and back. The statement wasn't verbatim.
I can't think of any plausible reason why Gerry would have said that he'd taken the long way round, yet state
that he had gone out via the unlocked veranda door (correction: he didn't state which door he'd gone out from in his first statement) and that Matt had gone in and out via the unlocked veranda in the same statement, and Kate (the next witness) only stated going in and out via the same veranda door.
Initial lost-in-understanding seems far more likely to me. In any case, the issue was eventually spotted and cleared up in Gerry's subsequent interview.