This paper reports on a corpus-based study of clause connectives in translated and non-translated Finnish children’s literature. The frequent use of clause connectives as explicit signals of clausal relations in translation might be one manifestation of the hypothesised translation universal referred to as explicitation. A one-million-word corpus of children’s books both originally written in Finnish and translated from English into Finnish was used as research material to compare the relative frequencies of a number of connectives (conjunctions, specific adverbs) signalling e.g. causal, temporal and postmodifying relations. The results reveal no clear overall tendency of either translated or originally Finnish literature using connectives more frequently, and thus fail to fully support the explicitation hypothesis. Nevertheless, in addition to some frequency differences, some differences were found between translations and originals in the functions and contexts of a few connectives.