As far as the name goes, kukkurovaca has to break down as “kukkura uvāca”,(kukkura uvāca) which means something like “Oh you dog, he speaks/spoke.” What we meant when we invented the term was kukkuro brute, “The dog said,” which is a quote from the Hitopadesha.
And some other thing or other I presumably wrote for some other profile page:
bq. “kukkurovaca” defines my translation style –drastically literal. Or it was supposed to. It was a reference to a sentence I translated as “Dog say: repetition of my business how by you doable”-which should really read something like “The dog said, ‘Who are you to worry about my business.’” But given that we forgot both the correct vocabulary and regular sandhi rules (even if we used “uvāca” instead of “brute” we should have ended up with something like kukkuro uvāca), “kukkurovaca” stands both for my literality and for my error-prone laziness.