This article is an attempt to develop a complex model for conceptualizing and analyzing the cultural history of literary translation. The author draws on systems theory, as employed by sociologists, and on categories familiar from discourse analysis. While advocating the methodological primacy of studying literary translations as an integral part of the target literature, the further refines this paradigm, established in descriptive Translation Studies by conceptualizing the target literature as a “functionally differentiated social sub-system”. The concept of functional differentiation has novel theoretical implications, offering the possibility of distinguishing between literature as a social system, its qualifying historical conditions, and corresponding programs - by which he means strategies of canonization, such as Nationalliteratur, or Goethe’s notion of Weltliteratur. Together with genre-related expectations, and with indicators of cultural development these problematic strategies comprise the spectrum of literary quasi-norms affecting translation.