“The elephant has a long trunk”
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A short note about translation.
When making foreign applications for the national phase of PCT applications or for Paris route applications, it’s necessary to translate the Japanese specification into English or other languages. Naturally, it’s important to make a good translation, but you could also try to prepare a specification which is easy to translate from the start.
To construct sentences that are easy to translate into English, they say you should try not to omit the subject. I guess it means to keep to the SVO sentence structures of English.
But as the linguist Akira Mikami points out using the example sentence “the elephant has a long trunk (Zoo wa Hana ga Nagai),” the Japanese language is structured in a way that doesn’t require a subject. And so, if you try to write a sentence in Japanese by expressing all the subjects according to the rules of English, you will probably end up with a very unnatural sentence. In other words, if you try to write in a way so that it’s easy to translate, the beauty of Japanese writing will be lost and you will end up with an awkward sentence which sounds as if it’s been badly translated from English.
But, personally, when writing a specification of a patent application, I believe that priority should be given to writing sentences that are easy to translate correctly rather than writing beautiful Japanese.