In Dutch you can often use "er" as a sort of temporary/provisional subject. For example: "Er klopte niets van" or "Er wachtte een man op haar". For this reason English teachers come across less than perfect sentences such as: "There waited a man for her." In English you can only use "there" as a temporary subject in combination with the verb "to be", such as: "There are many pupils in this room". In other cases you have to figure out what the real subject in the sentence is and make your sentence from there. For the examples you could say something, like: "Nothing was right", and "There was a man, who was waiting for her. / A man was waiting for her."
So be warned: Dutch "er" can be tricky to translate in Dutch.
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