From Dracula to Drácula

This article studies three translations of Dracula into Spanish – one from the 1960s, one from the 1970s but still being published in the twenty-first century, and one recent one – and compares their rendering of two key words, ‘bloofer’ and ‘undead’, and two key aspects of Stoker’s text: the presentation of foreignness and that of Anglicanism versus Roman Catholicism. Disappointingly, it finds unnecessary as well as inevitable translation loss in the three versions, leading in all cases to a far blander product than Stoker’s multivocal novel; counterintuitively, it also discovers that the positive presentation of Catholicism in contrast to Anglicanism in the source text is less apparent in the two versions published during the Franco regime than in the present-day one.