Removing punctuation and lowercasing a string
Instead of just import string you could get the punctuation list directly:

from string import punctuation

words = "Dave, Laura, Maddy, Dave, Laura, Maddy, Dave, Laura, Dave"
translation = str.maketrans("", "", punctuation)


I'd also remove the semicolons. Python doesn't need them to know when a line of code ends since it uses newlines instead (there are exceptions, but none here) so you can remove them.