One of the best-known hypotheses of translation studies, the Explicitation Hypothesis, postulates that explicitation is "inherent" in the process of translation and may therefore be regarded as a "universal of translation". In recent years, a number of corpusbased studies on explicitation have been produced, most of which purport to offer evidence in favor of this hypothesis. As a consequence, the alleged universality of explicitation has achieved the status of dogma in translation studies. The aim of the present article is to show that the dogma of translation-inherent explicitation rests on fallacious theoretical considerations and premature interpretations of empirical data. In the first place, it will be argued that the Explicitation Hypothesis strictly speaking does not even qualify as a scientific hypothesis, since it is unmotivated, unparsimonious and vaguely formulated. In the second place, it will be shown that previous studies on explicitation fail to provide conclusive evidence for the translation-inherent nature of explicitation due to a number of methodological shortcomings.

Additions and omissions of connectives (e.g. conjunctions, connective adverbs, etc.) are a frequent phenomenon in translation. The present article reports on a study whose aim was to elucidate translators' motivations for performing such shifts, focusing on the addition of connectives. The study was carried out on a bidirectional parallel corpus containing translations of business texts between English and German. Connective additions and omissions were identified, counted and analyzed taking into account the surrounding linguistic context of the shift in question, possibly associated shifts performed by the translator, alternative translation options, etc. It was found that the vast majority of identified shifts were attributable to previously established English-German contrasts in terms of syntax, lexis, and communicative norms. The findings suggest that it is unnecessary to assume that translators follow a "universal strategy" of explicitation, as it has often been done in the literature (cf. e.g. Blum-Kulka's Explicitation Hypothesis).

This contribution addresses the question of whether and how translation as a classic case of language contact can act as a trigger for convergence and divergence phenomena between two languages. We present two studies which indicate that translation-induced convergence does not occur unconditionally: while we found no signs of English-German convergence in the use of modal verbs (study 1), the use of sentence-initial concessive conjunctions in translated and comparable German texts shows convergence with Anglophone usage patterns (study 2). Explaining these disparate results, we hypothesize that divergence occurs when bilinguals perceive profound differences between source and target language (as is the case in English and German lexicogrammatical means for expressing modality), while convergence takes place when bilinguals perceive items as equivalent in form and function (as is the case in English and German concessive conjunctions).

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