The author studies cracks in a link of interlinguistic transformations or, what she calls, intersignifications. The object of the study is an autobiography by Gregorio Condori Mamani, a Quechua speaker from southern Peru, whose story was delivered, orally, to two Quechua-Spanish speaking anthropologists and printed in a bilingual (Quechua and Spanish) edition, and then also translated into English, without the Quechua original. The author compares the three levels of meaning construction. She notices among other things that the Spanish translation loses the original code-mix, in other words the language of the 'first' contact zone is levelled; another observation she makes is that terms defining identity are relational (hybrid) and that attempts at 'translating' them transform the original positional concept of identity to serve the epistemological understanding of another audience. The tactics of italicisation supported by a glossary, and footnotes, respectively, seem to have the effect of handing the reader a traveller's survival kit," she deplores. She calls the editor's strategies "ethnographisation."