The joint
The novel’s first three words put the day before the death, and the death in a child’s noun. Maman is not mère. A few lines later the telegram says Mère décédée, and the cold form is the institution’s. Meursault’s own word is the warm one. Readers who find him heartless are often responding to a translation that has already chilled the noun.
Gilbert’s “Mother died today” does that chilling, and it also rearranges the sentence so the mother comes first. Ward’s “Maman died today” gives the noun back and still uses the English narrative past. Smith’s “My mother” is a third compromise, intimate by the possessive, ordinary by the noun. None of these is the passé composé, the tense of someone speaking.
The title is a related, smaller break, noted here rather than drawn as a lane. Étranger covers stranger, foreigner, and outsider. English has had to pick. Gilbert’s British title was The Outsider; American editions of that era used The Stranger; Smith uses The Outsider again and says the one English word has to stand for all three.
Why this break matters to a reader
The first sentence is the evidence the court, and the reader, will use against him. If “Mother” has already made him formal, the flatness of the narration reads as coldness. If “maman” is allowed to be affectionate, the flatness reads as something else: a man speaking simply, in the tense of speech, about a death that is today or maybe yesterday. The case begins in that temperature.