This paper contradicts the prevailing assumptions among the advocates of translation universal (TU's) that explicitation, a translation behavior which consists of spelling things out rather than leaving them implicit in translation, is a potential TU , irrespective of the specific language pairs involved in the process of translation. Specifically, via a study employing a newly built 517,609-word parallel corpus, it is shown that amplification and the subsequent TT contraction as well as explicitaiton and TT expansion entailed were both observed in translation involving Korean and English. The significance of the direction of language combinations in translation employing the same language pair was identified, together with the introduction and verification of the validity of the four measurement units devised for this study to capture diverse aspects of explicitation/implicitation which in turn entail TT expansion/contraction.