The paper responds to an article by Christopher Hopkinson ("Explicitation and Implicitation of Binary Coherence Relations in Translation", 2007), by subjecting Hopkinson's hypothesis, i.e. that within the ideational and textual functions, there are not only quantitative, but also qualitative differences between explicitation and implicitation and that these qualitative differences can be revealed by studying shifts in explicitness of 'static' and 'dynamic' binary coherence relations; to testing on a parallel corpus of literary translations. The results of the quantitative analysis suggest that the distribution of explicitness shifts in binary coherence relations is different for literary and non-literary translation, especially as far as temporal coherence relations are concerned. Qualitative analysis of explicitness shifts in binary coherence relations on the borderline between the 'static' and 'dynamic' categories has shown that the concepts of 'staticity' and 'dynamism' of binary coherence relations need to be reconsidered.