Tony M Oct 1, 2021:

'choisir' The FR use of 'choisir' here is something that often causes me headaches in technical texts: when to your choose, pick or select — or indeed, what to do if none of these is suitable? 'Select' nowadays is so familiar in a computer context, as in 'select a menu item', thet 'unselect' has almost completely taken on the menaing more properly conveyed by 'deselect', and 'unselectable' the sense of 'greayed out / not able to be selected'
Here, 'choisir' has a much weaker meaning than in EN: it simply means to 'decide to use' etc. — i.e. there is no list of layer thicknesses from which to pick / choose / select, but simply a free choice of defining the layer thickness required. It's a bit like in EN? we might say that 'she could choose to go to the party or not' — in that example, we wouldn't usually say 'select'; but in order to go out, she might pick or select her black dress'

Tony M Oct 1, 2021:

'pourrait' Some people don't seem to appreciate the problem here with the ambiguity of 'could' in EN, where it can be either the simple past, or the conditional; in a positive expression, this is usually easy to make clear, but when we read 'could not', the mind first latches on to the much more common past tense: 'were not able to' and only gets to the notion of the conditional second. This possibility of mis-reading cannot be tolerated in a patent, so another workaround must be found; as I've suggested below, as it is not 'the layer' that cannot do something, but rather 'the user' who might not be able to..., I feel this alternative option is worth exploring.

Tony M Sep 30, 2021:

@ Asker I think you have to keep 'layer of the material', because that is precisely what it is: a layer of material; 'using' would imply something different.
As for 'pourrait', it is vital here to retain the sense of the conditional, and I would say "it might not be possible to select..." — rendering 'pouvoir' as 'to be able' can often get you out of a hole!
For the 'on' at the beginning, rather than substituting with the more personal 'we', I'd prefer to make the whole thing passive, although that involves rephrasing: 'It might have been decided to...'

Bashiqa (asker) Sep 30, 2021:

@ SafeTex Don`t mind at all, I`m always pleased to hear constructive advice. This is in fact another patent, hence lots of "the said" and "said" just to take up space (that`s my own opinion).

SafeTex Sep 30, 2021:

@ Bashiqa and all Hope you don't mind as you didn't ask this but if this is a study by the authors/company as I suspect, then I would translate the "on" (French) as "we",which is a bit more personal but not too much and much more common in English.

liz askew Sep 30, 2021:

confirmed.

Marge Hogarty Sep 30, 2021:

I like "could not be chosen"