“Peans! Not quite peas, not quite beans, but something special in between". So exclaims one of the first voices you hear in Thank Goodness You’re Here, a gloriously silly romp through the fictional yet explicitly British—and explicitly very northern— town of Barnsworth. It’s made me laugh out loud more than any game in recent memory—but when the credits rolled and I saw translation teams listed for nine different languages, my mind boggled.
This is a game that revs at 300 puns a minute, with jokes that lean on sheer mouthfeel (“Porky Knobbers: That Wet Crunch”) or come so battered in Britishness that you’d think an international audience would struggle to get their chip forks in. There’s a slow-building multi-hour gag that results in a character exclaiming "Lady Diiiihhh", rhyming with free, for Christ’s sake. How would a translator approach that?
