start => pootle

# What's in a name?

How did we arrive at such a strange name? There are of course more imnpolite ways of phrasing that question but the answer is always the same, “Yes we know that its sounds similar to that Spanish word”. We followed the American tradition (with all of us being African that was of course easy, since it was nice to make sweeping assumptions about another country for a change) which is to find a word and create and acronym.

The word Pootle comes from this 1970’s BBC TV Childrens program called The Flumps. The memories of which proved funnier then watching it 30 years later. Although the bit about Pootle keeping a secret and having to own secrets was quite funny for an Open Source coder. David Fraser's wife Danielle, a British lass and thus with experience on all things British, especially BBC Childrens TV, chose the name. Pootle is the cute and fluffy baby Flump in the series so in sometimes Open Source tradition of cure and fluffy mascots, like Tux the penguin, Pootle stuck.

So now that we had the name and accidently a mascot, we now needed the words for the acronym. That proved much harder. Well not really. The accronum Pootle is derived from PO-based Online Translation / Localization Engine. With a move to XLIFF we might need to create Xlotle.

Pootle the character has gone through some changes. You’ll notice that mst improvements and due to an improved diet now that Pootle is a true celebrety, not some kids TV series bit part player. But the core secret is that Pootle semi secretly took part in the Body-for-Life™ program.

## Pootle through the ages

Or how I lost fat and gained mustle by getting my own Graphic Designer.

Pootle when he was newly born. Bound to be copyright the BBC but somehow can’t find any copyright information.

Pootle then realised that be might be contravening some copyright law saw he had to be handdrawn. You can see from the shaky lines that Pootle, or at least some prgorammer, respects copyright law.

A kind volunteer, who had probably dicovered some new SVG drawring tool, made us this nice version. This one guarded the gate for easy online translation for quite some time.

Overcome by some fitness fad and also realising that due to the WordForge project Pootle might be seeing some more people. Weight training left us with this. Not sure why the legs never developed.