The present paper is an attempt to investigate explicitation _ as the most thoroughly investigated of translation universals _ in two translations of Sadegh Hedayat’s “Blind Owl” by Iraj Bashiri (unpublished) and D. P. Costello (1957) on the basis of Klaudy and Kroly’s (Pym 2005; 2003) model. As this model represents explicitation occurs either symmetrically or asymmetrically. Regarding this dichotomy of Klaudy and Kroly (ibid) on explicitation, the former emerges from the language pairs involved in translation and is hence obligatory, and the latter occurs regardless of the languages under question and is hence optional. In other words, in symmetric explicitation every explicitation of this kind is counterbalanced by implicitation if the direction of translation is reversed. According to Klaudy and Kroly (ibid) only the asymmetric explicitation can gain the status of a translation universal. In this study first instances of explicitation in the abovementioned translations were found to see whether their occurrence was symmetric (obligatory) or asymmetric (optional/universal) and hence to find out which one was more frequent in the two translations. The results of the study revealed that in both translations symmetric explicitation occurred more frequently than the other, and hence in translating, regarding Persian and English languages, most of the explicitations occur symmetrically i.e. mostof explicitations result from the language pairs involved in translation and to the same token cannot be accounted as universal.
