English Translation
It was on sale.
“on sale” can either mean that it was up for sale, or that it was discounted. Can verkauf also mean both?
“zum Verkauf stehen” means “to be for sale”, i.e. you can buy it. It never means “discounted”. That would be for example “es gibt einen Rabatt” or “es ist herabgesetzt/heruntergesetzt”.
One thing about the sentence I find odd is that the verb is “anstehen” and not just “stehen”.
That either means a person (“er”?) is literally in line for some counter/desk that sells stuff, or that the thing that is for sale is not yet available, but is up for sale in the near future.
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There are several odd things about this sentence pairing. But one thing after another.
No, “zum Verkauf stehen” simply means that you can buy it. It doesn’t say anything about whether the item is discounted or not. If your intention is to express that the item is currently discounted for a limited time, you have to use other words (for example those that @pitti42 already proposed).
Next, there seems to be a significant typo. The German sentence says “Er” (“He”) but I think it was intended to write “Es” (“It”), since the English sentence is “It”. Also, “er” (“he”) doesn’t make much sense in this context, or at least much less sense (see @pitti42’s answer for the two meanings). Although “er” (in the sense of “it” instead of “he”) could also refer to an object with a masculine grammatical gender. Update: This is the case. Digging a bit into the source material at Tatoeba revealed that the translator had sentences like “Der Wagen (the car) steht zum Verkauf” in mind, which is unnecessarily confusing if the required context isn’t given. Thus it’s not a typo, it’s just unnecessarily picking a special case when the normal case would have done the job.
I also find that odd. The verb “anstehen” in this context means it’s still pending or coming up (compare: “Was steht an?” / “What’s up?”). So, the German sentence simply means (ignoring the typo): It wasn’t yet for sale, but at that moment in time you didn’t have to wait very long anymore before you could buy it. But the English sentence “It was on sale” means you could already (and possibly still can) buy it, possibly even at a discounted price (the double meaning mentioned by @eliptats1). This meaning doesn’t match with the German sentence which says the opposite: you could not buy it. To make the meanings match, you would need to remove “an”. “Es stand zum Verkauf” means “It was for sale” (I used “for” instead of “on” to avoid the ambiguity of “on sale”.)
Personally, I would add this sentence to my list of ignored sentences. There’s too much odd about it.
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There’s a lot of things with masculine gender that can be sold. For example:
Der Wagen stand zum Verkauf an.
So I wasn’t too confused about that. In fact, on tatoeba, there’s all three gender versions.
See It was on sale. - Beispielsatz Englisch- Tatoeba.
I suspect, the person that translated this to german was confused about the difference between “to be for sale” and “to be on sale”. I always thought “for sale” = can be bought and “on sale” = discounted. But looking at wiktionary, it seems “on sale” can mean both, and it’s a “US vs. the rest” thing.
See on sale - Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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That’s what I thought too.
That was new to me. I’m going to continue using “for sale” and “on sale” (how Americans, you, and I speak).
I don’t think the British way of speaking makes the difference between discount and no discount any clearer (“on sale” when Americans say “for sale” and “on offer” when Americans say “on sale”), since an item that is sold is also offered.
I have the same suspicion. Perhaps it was a Briton who translated it.
You’re right, I didn’t consider that.
Admittedly, German has three grammatical genders (der/die/das), even for inanimate things, whereas English has only one (the). Consequently, German can refer even to objects with “he” or “she” (in addition to “it”) whereas English always uses “it” for objects.
Nonetheless …
… I think it’s overzealous to create three German sentences (with all three grammarical genders; er/sie/es) for an English “it” sentence. The “es” version suffices when translating from English to German (you don’t need additional “sie” and “er” versions for essentially the same sentence), and in the other direction, from German to English, it only causes unnecessary confusion, as it happened in this topic discussion.
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