In her first and third novels How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents and ¡Yo!, Julia Alvarez writes about the Dominican-American experience through the lives of an immigrant family. Her personal understanding of the context results in a complex and believable set of hybrid characterizations. In her second novel, In the Time of the Butterflies, there is a purely Dominican context. In translating this history of the Mirabal sisters, Alvarez is unable to avoid the influence of her Dominican-American experience. Therefore, these characterizations are less believable, stereotypical and not reasonably justified given their context. Unconvincing and sudden moments of conversion are a further consequence of Alvarez's failure to correctly reflect Dominican culture in her translation of the story.