Christiane Nord’s 'loyalty' concept refers to persons (author, commissioner, reader) whereas the traditional “fidelity” concept refers to texts (source text, target text). Erich Prunč and Ulrich Kautz have proposed a forth type of loyalty: loyalty to the translator him/herself. These loyalty relations might be sufficient for the translation of LSP-texts. But in literary translation, the relations are more complex. Here other social factors, people or institutions have to be taken into account. Furthermore, it is much more difficult to determine a 'generalized reader'. The analysis becomes even more complex when we try to reconstruct loyalty relations in historical situations within a different social context. This problem is illustrated in this paper by two historical case studies.