This dissertation describes a study on explicitation and implicitation for the language pair German-Dutch based on a product-oriented corpus study of nominal compounds in translated literary and non-literary texts. The literature study showed that in the course of their sixty-year history, explicitation and implicitation were interpreted in different – oft intuitive – ways, due to a missing theory-based definition of both terms, causing studies on the topic to be very heterogeneous and their findings difficult to compare. It was therefore decided to first and foremost limit the scope of explicitation and implicitation to the level of the translation product and to interpret them as translation solutions (Gambier 2009, 2010) that can only be observed when comparing source and target texts (Krüger 2014). Explicitation and implicitation were then redefined within relevance theory (Sperber/Wilson 1995). Relevance theory, introduced in translation studies by Gutt (1991) and further employed in Alves (2010) and Murtisari (2013), was considered to be the most appropriate theoretical framework for explicitation and implicitation, on the one hand because of its cognitive and pragmatic approach, on the other hand because the theory clearly distinguishes between explicit and implicit communicated information. The actual redefinition of explicitation and implicitation was preceded by the fundamental, for translation studies purposes necessary redefinition of explicitness and implicitness. Subsequently, explicitation and implicitation were distinguished from the related translation solutions addition, omission and substitution and the translation studies terms interference, standardization and simplification. These categories were considered to be the results of one overarching strategy, namely the pursuit of successful communication with the target audience by striving for optimal relevance and reducing the risk of communicative breakdown (Pym 2005). This theoretical foundation formed the starting point for the ...