saat beş buçuğa beş var.

It is daily Turkish and non-useful as you know. You can say 17:25 or twenty five past five instead of it. Its more understandable.

We have this expression in our language also. I guess it is about avoiding the big numbers. But I never heard about anything similar in English. Here a Polish speaker is asking about the same thing:

                        http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=387256