English Translation
Tom sat on a stool in the corner.
Wouldn’t the correct translation be “Tom was sitting down…”?
I believe “Tom sat down…” (action in the past) should be “Tom s’est assis…”
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If sit + down was used, I would also translate it as “Tom s’est assis” or “Tom s’assis” (Passé simple).
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Without any preposition, I think that “to sit” can be used to describe either the action of taking a seat, or the state of (already) being seated.
Since “down” is not used in the English sentence, I think the French translation is fine here.
There is a very interesting discussion here:
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Ah. I didn’t think about the difference betwen sit and sit down. I agree - 'was sitting on the bench" is different from “was sitting down on the bench”, the latter being an active action and the former more of a state / description. But in simple past tense, “sat” without preposition still feels like an action and not a state.
Given that, I would still say the correct transaltion would be “Tim was sitting on a stool” not “Tom sat on a stool”.
FWIW, I understand how you feel. Maybe I’ve heard “sat” used to mean “was sitting” often enough, that it no longer feels weird to me… 
Without any context, I would translate these 3 sentences the same way:
- “X was sitting on…”
- “X sat on…”
- “X was seated on…”
→ “X était assis(e) sur…”
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Until fairly recently, I’ve always taken “he sat on” to be a description of state, probably because of the similarity with my native Swedish, where the equivalent “han satt på” (versus “han satte sig på”) is unambiguous: “he was sitting (seated) on”. Only after joining Clozemaster (and Tatoeba) have I come to realize that things are not so simple as that. In my experience, people speaking Germanic languages seem to favor the state view in their translations, and people speaking Romance languages favor the action view. This particular sentence would then be an exception.
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Interesting… I can see how this could apply to French here:
was sitting → était assis
sat → s’assis
I wonder how the people who favor the “action view” feel about a sentence like:
“He just sat there.”
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Like these:
https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences/show/4850061
https://tatoeba.org/en/sentences/show/311456
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That’s it.