This paper considers the protection of translucent elastic optical networks (EONs) through p-cycles. Such networks improve spectrum efficiency by employing regenerators and using advanced modulation formats for transmission. P-cycles provide fast restoration and high protection efficiency, and have been studied for conventional fixed-grid WDM networks as well as EONs. In this paper, we consider the design and selection of p- cycles for translucent EONs with 3R regenerators in a network. We propose two novel link-protection p-cycle evaluation methods in translucent EONs: individual p-cycle selection and p-cycle set selection. Based on these two metrics, Traffic Independent P-cycle Selection with 3R regenerator (TIPS-3R) and Traffic-Oriented P-cycle Selection with 3R regenerator (TOPS-3R), are designed to find the best set of p-cycles under a given 3R regenerator placement. We evaluate our algorithms using both static traffic and dynamic traffic. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithms have a lower spectrum usage and lower blocking ratio compared with baseline algorithms.