English Translation
Juan has never seen an elephant in his life.
I believe this can be shortened to “Juan en su vida ha visto un elefante”; the negation is already implied.
You can say that, but not because the negation is implied, rather it’s because you’ve moved ‘en su vida’ before the verb, the same pattern as ‘no lo sabe nadie’ = ‘nadie lo sabe’. ‘Juan ha visto un elefante en su vida’ would be wrong.
The original sentence also sounds bad because ‘nunca’ already means ‘en su vida’.
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