This contribution addresses the methodological question of how to construct and analyse an extensive survey so as to allow for a reconstruction of literary translators’ habitus. It is based on a middle-scale survey amongst literary translators who translate from a range of languages into German and are (primarily) based in Germany, Austria or Switzerland. The questionnaire touched upon all areas deemed central to the respondents’ social trajectories, which are understood in this context as the social construction of (the reputation or personality of) a literary translator, thus ultimately aiming at a characterization of the participants’ translatorial habitus. The question of how to construct a translation-sociological questionnaire in such a way that it allows for conclusions concerning the habitus of literary translators is central to this contribution, along with a consideration of which aspects within Bourdieu’s thought might be especially conducive to give interpretive structure to comprehensive “masses” of survey data. It is argued that we find an answer in some less frequently discussed theoretical undercurrents within Bourdieu’s oeuvre, namely his “differential anthropology of symbolic forms” and the concomitant temporal dimension with its central concepts of project and pretension reaching back to a phenomenological tradition. An outline is given of possible methodological steps which might follow from such a theoretical orientation.