replace the punctuation with whitespace

It is easy to achieve by changing your “maketrans” like this:

import string
tweet = "I am tired! I like fruit...and milk"
translator = string.maketrans(string.punctuation, ' '*len(string.punctuation)) #map punctuation to space
print(tweet.translate(translator))

It works on my machine running python 3.5.2 and 2.x.
Hope that it works on yours too.