Explicitation has long occupied a prominent but contested place in Translation and Interpreting Studies, generally referring to the more explicit rendering of information that is implicit, inferable, or less overtly encoded in the source. This systematic review of previous empirical and conceptual research, reported in accordance with PRISMA 2020, examines how explicitation has been defined, operationalised, and evidenced, and how methodological and contextual variation affects cross-study comparability. Searches of Web of Science and Scopus, covering records up to 23 June 2026, yielded 484 records; after deduplication and screening, 105 studies were included, comprising 101 empirical studies and four conceptual studies. Data were extracted using a structured form and synthesised through theoretically guided narrative synthesis. The review identified three recurrent conceptual traditions – shift-based, tendency-based or distributional, and inferential or relevance-theoretic – alongside studies adopting a more feature-led approach. Empirical studies examined these conceptualisations through five principal indicator families: connectives and discourse relations, optional complementisers, referential expressions, lexical and syntactic expansion, and terminological and lexical reformulation. Evidence was recurrent but heterogeneous, with interpretation shaped by corpus design, language configuration, directionality, genre, expertise, translation mode, and technological mediation. Overall, the findings support a conditional,indicator-specific and operationalised account of explicitation rather than a strong universal claim and demonstrate the importance of aligning conceptualisation, operationalisation, evidence type, and claim scope in cumulative research.
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Zheng et al. (2026) studied this question.