The present article examines how a systematic study of literary translation as a literary phenomenon can be conducted regarding isolated and more specifically literary translations in their immediate environment, the target literature. The purpose is to test a number of translation theories and more specifically the notion of equivalence, to show that most theories that serve as a basis for translation education are not suitable for literary translation, to prove that there is a need for a target-oriented approach for the the description of literary translations as an empirical phenomenon and to sketech a theoretical and methodological basis for such an approach.