The awesome power of Japanese

I remember that even in college, my Japanese studies used to influence the way that I wrote English, sometime for the worse.  Now that I'm a translator the danger of this happening is even greater.  I stumbled across a good example of this recently.  The verb "exists" is used sparingly in most English writing, but Japanese uses verbs that mean "to exist" much more frequently.  If I'm not careful I can find myself using it more often than I should.

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

"When a signal disturbance exists..."
versus
"When there is a signal disturbance... "