In the translation world there has been a lot of debate about the appropriate balance between what can be presupposed to be known by the addressed audience and what is transmitted as "new" information, particularly when dealing with references to the source culture. Some argue that translators should not underestimate the target readership and maintain the degree of explicitness or implicitness found in the source text. On the contrary, others use long footnotes to explain whatever they had looked up themselves during the translation process. In this paper, Nord tries to find some arguments for and against these attitudes. To start with, she briefly presents the four-function model she developed for translation teaching and practice, and then takes a closer look at the referential function before going into the details of explicitness and implicitness, using examples from different text types and genres.