I'm looking for feedback about a translation from another language.
I'm translating an assignment from Russian to English and in Russian there is a construction that roughly translates to "If when". The full context of the sentence is, "If when you transform a positive phrase into a negative one, it will not make sense".
To me, this sounds unnatural, so is "If when..." grammatically correct and acceptable? I know that there are lots of varieties of English, but I'm from the USA and this is the first time I've seen this construction. I personally would just choose one or the other, i.e. "If you transform...." or "When you transform....".