Ugh, got busy with other matters and the forum software ate my draft at some point. Starting over...
"Tits" and "Boobs" also mean the same thing. Despite that, these words are used in different contexts by different people. And a story where a child walks up to his mom and asks about her "tits" is a very different one from a boy that asks about her "Boobs".
The distinction between "tits" and "boobs" is nothing like the distinction between "doggo" and "dog". In English, there's very little difference between a stranger referring to a "cute dog" and "cute doggo" they see on a walk.
Here, the young man used the plain word for "Dog", without devolving into cutesy names and speech patterns. And, as I keep saying: Japanese has equivalents for "Doggo", so the choice of wording is entirely deliberate.
He also used the colloquial "デカ", no keigo, and a more informal "なー" (instead of "な"). It was also written with no kanji—compare the author depicting his thoughts in ch. 2 with plenty of kanji despite him having hearts in his eyes while hugging Mii. There is an obvious level of informality and excitement that is perfectly reasonable to depict using "doggo".
Because I missed the ぬ at the end, mistakenly leaving it as デカいね かわいい in my mind. Thankfully, I can admit to my mistakes; I find that's a rare trait.
P.S.: It's な, not は
You're right, it should be "デカいぬかわいいなー".
Having said that, how did you miss that!? In the original, "デカいぬ" was all on its own line. For someone who claims to be so knowledgeable about Japanese, it's a rather simple thing to miss.
Yeah, Mikan's a girl's name.
Exhibit A:
https://toloveru.fandom.com/wiki/Yūki_Mikan
Exhibit B:
https://namedic.jp/names/yomi/f/みかん
I suspect there might have been a misunderstanding with the dog name thing on your end.
I can't say I spent much time on it, but the point was that the dog's gender was uncertain, not that female wasn't the best guess. And look:
https://namedic.jp/names/yomi/m/みかん It does seem like it can be used as a male name, although it is certainly much rarer.
(Also, Takase doesn't seem to know the dog, hadn't heard the name at that point, and was across the street from it. Why would he assume female when the default in English tends to be male?)
The second line, had it not literally said いぬ would have been perfectly translatable into English without literally mentioning the dog, since the subject is obvious from context. Turns out, English has implicit subjects too!
English has far fewer implicit subjects than Japanese. There are a lot of places in English where the subject is mandatory, even if you just use "he", "she", "they", or "it"—and good luck if the speaker is supposed to know which would be appropriate while the reader is not, since English makes it awkward to do so.
I don't understand the question. Both languages have normal words for "Dog" to be used in more formal, serious conversation, then cutesy words for "dog" to be used in more informal contexts. That's your correspondence. Just because we don't have the equivalent formality for words like です and verb endings like ます doesn't mean there's literally no correspondence in formality at all between the languages. English and Japanese both have Formal registers. That Japanese happens to have more formal registers that are more pervasive doesn't really change that.
I said "one-to-one correspondence". Sure, English has more and less formal ways of speaking, but translating from Japanese to English still inevitably involves losing some formality differences and/or making alternative choices as to how to represent the many more ones in Japanese. And, yes, that sometimes means using vocabulary choices—which English has a surfeit of—as a substitute.
You've become stuck on there being a one-to-one correspondence between "いぬ" and "dog" vs. "ワンワン" and "doggo"—which is itself not accurate—while ignoring or minimizing the many other aspects of the speech that needed to be conveyed.
The boy didn't break social convention and bust out the slang because he saw a cute dog. He kept a perfectly normal, appropriate distance while also expressing interest.
He spoke loudly and excitedly enough to cause the dog across the street to start barking happily and inconveniencing its owner. He did use slang ("デカ") but didn't use keigo, and to a stranger. Sure, he could have been much worse, but your characterization of this speech doesn't seem to match its actual presentation.
But tell you what: If the anime ever comes out for this, and the boy sounds like he's absolutely gushing over the dog, I'll gladly eat crow in the forum of your choosing.
What would that prove? Anime makes changes all of the time to its presentation of events. Maybe stick to the evidence at hand?
"Doggo" is slang that isn't present in the original. He didn't lose all composure and start baby talking the dog. And the problem is that the author actually had the option of including the slang if she so desired.
The author also had the option of writing "大犬がかわいいですな。", but didn't do that, either.
So the fact that it's not there was a deliberate choice on her part.
Ditto for various more formal versions that could have been used, too.
I know it's hard to understand, since this is all stuff that's limited to TL nerds, but the characters are speaking a specific way in their own language. It's important to preserve that across languages as much as possible. And yeah, that means we don't change the way they speak.
Haven't you noticed that you've been talking to TL nerds (or in my case, a minor linguistics nerd) all this time? If anything, the arguments against you have mostly been about how preserving this across languages is more complicated than your position that "いぬ" can only be translated as "dog" would allow.
So if the boy isn't busting out slang, why the hell are you?!
Why the hell am I what? I didn't translate this. (And, again, he did use slang.)
