僕は友達が少ない

僕は友達が少ない　(boku wa tomodachi ga sukunai): I have little friends

1. The Exemplary Contextual Error

One of the problems with Google Translate is that it has too much of information and very little contextual analysis. Computers all by themselves cannot completely understand language. It is not just the connotations that are missed by the machine but the whole context itself. One of the most exemplary models to illustrate this is as follows:

僕は友達が少ない([bwtgs]: boku wa tomodachi ga sukunai ), means I have little friends. For those of you who watch anime might have guessed what happens when you try it in Google Translate. It simply translates as `Haganai`. What does that even mean!?? And there are no alternatives available in the Google Translate.

The actual phrase in Japanese is the title of a short anime seires and since its name was a little too long, its dubbed version in English was titled `Haganai`!  This is a complete contextual error which the machine couldn't identify because it simply saw that most people who searched [bwtgs] mostly looked for the anime and not the actual phrase in Japanese! What a shame!!

僕は友達が少ない(ぼくはともだちがすくない）boku wa tomodachi ga sukunai, means I have little friends