The term 'explicitation' in Translation Studies is used to refer to a process resulting in a higher degree of explicitness. Explicitation is claimed to be a translation universal: translators seem to show a preference for the operation of explicitation irrespective of the direction of translation, and translated text seem to exhibit a higher degree of explicitness than on-translated target language texts. The claim is supported by the findings of corpus-based studies on translated and non-translated text. Studies on explicitation often note that explicitation is necessary, among other, to recover elements ellipted in the source text, and that explicitation often leads to a higher degree of redundancy in the target text. In most studies, however, the relations between explicitation, ellipsis and redundancy are not elucidated. It is unclear what exactly explicitness means, and whether greater linguistic explicitness will always lead to easier processing. Apparently, greater explicitness of translated texts, as compared to original target language texts, does not make them easier to understand. It seems obvious that the psycholinguistic consequences of explicitation must be considered together with ellipsis and redundancy and the issue of how they affect ease of processing. This paper is an attempt to consider these issues.