Abstract This article conducts a corpus-based comparative study of explicitation, one of the translation universals widely explored, by investigating the use of connectives in two versions of the Chinese translation of The Lord of the Ring s from Taiwan and Mainland China. The two versions are compared with the originally produced Chinese text and their source text to find out whether explicitation through the use of connectives occurs in Chinese translation and to what extent such explicitation is influenced by the source text. A quantitative plus qualitative method is adopted to analyze the connectives in the two Chinese versions and compare them with their counterparts in the source text and the non-translated target text. The results show that explicitation occurs in both versions and that the Taiwan version exhibits a higher degree of explicitation than the Mainland version. Such findings may result from different pedagogical and regional translation norms, especially with greater importance attached to faithfulness in translation in Mainland China.