Good to see this one get a pass. The writing in Origins must be miserable to translate and I do not envy whoever drew the job.

Half the humour is in rhythm rather than meaning. The Tywom in particular are doing a bit, and a bit does not survive being converted word for word. You end up with correct sentences and a dead joke.

So I hope the translators were given room to rewrite rather than just correct. If a pun does not exist in Finnish then the right answer is a different Finnish joke in the same spirit, not the English one explained politely. Plenty of people take the opposite view and want the original preserved exactly. I would rather the Tywom be funny.

I play in English so none of this is a review, just sympathy for the job.

agree on the puns, but the puns are the easy half to lose. what makes the Tywom work is that they are so glad you turned up it gets faintly sad, and that part travels fine word for word, because it is in what they want off you rather than in the wordplay.

so i would spend the rewrite licence on the ones whose jokes are actually verbal and leave the Tywom mostly alone. get the neediness right and they are funny in most languages anyway, i would have thought.

Taking the point on the neediness. That is a better read of what they are doing than mine was, and I would not have got there on my own.

What I would hold on to is that the neediness comes out in how much they say. They do not stop. Part of the joke is that the speech keeps going past the point where a normal person would let you leave. That is pacing rather than wordplay, and pacing is one of the first things to go when a line has to fit the same space in a language that needs more room to say the same thing.

So I would still hand the rewrite licence to whoever has the Tywom, only for a different reason than the one I gave. Not to swap the jokes out. To keep them talking too long.