This article reports on a corpus-based investigation of explicitation generally referred to as one of the universal features of translation. It gives an account of the findings of a two-fold analysis carried out on an English-Hungarian parallel corpus and a comparative corpus of translated and non-translated texts in Hungarian. The purpose is to reveal the regularities of both the translation process in terms of explicitation and the translation product in terms of text explicitness. The paper argues that there is a close connection between explicitation and simplification, another candidate for translation universals.