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A comment on German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook Messages. Parent comment

Re:German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook... by smartician on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @05:00PM (#5864694)
My translation would be "Officials baffled Jana with a printout of her complete Facebook correspondence with her future host. Their allegation: the young woman intended to work illegally in the US. The authorities had apparently been reading Jana's private messages on Facebook for weeks".

The key word being "apparently", i.e. bad journalism, jumping to conclusions for a more sensationalist story.

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Re:German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook... by Yver on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @05:18PM (#5864786)
It's an automatic translation, so wording may be haphazard. I note that "offenbar" (from the original article) can also mean "obvious", as in "It was apparent that the authorities had read her correspondence."

Edit: just noticed you had written "my translation", not "the translation". My German is nowhere good enough to translate the article, I'm just working off Google's.

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Re:German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook... by graup on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @05:24PM (#5864823)
"offenbar" can indeed mean "obviously", but in the context of a news article it's a weasel word more close to "apparently". To a native speaker, this word sounds as though they are presenting facts, but reading closely they are only assuming, just like smartician said.
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Re:German Girl Turned Away at Border Due to Private Facebook... by smartician on Tuesday June 11, 2013 @05:29PM (#5864850)
Slightly off-topic, but "obvious" would be "offensichtlich" in German. "Offenbar" implies a higher degree of uncertainty. "Scheinbar" or "anscheinend" is even more uncertain, to the point of doubt. And finally, "angeblich" is very questionable, almost an accusation of lying.
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