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The Outsider or The Stranger: the right title for the English language translation of Albert Camus’s 1942 classic, L’Étranger, isn’t obvious. Choosing a title is among the most important decisions a literary translator must make. It is hard to sum up a writer’s work in a new language, and once a title is on the cover, readers start to know the book by that name. An étranger can mean a foreign national, an alienated outsider or an unfamiliar traveller. So why has the novel always been called The Stranger in American editions, and The Outsider in British ones? The two titles tempt us to fill in the blank with cultural or political theories. We could imagine, for example, that in the melting pot of New York, the immigrant publishing firm Knopf had a sense of foreignness that directed them towards The Stranger, whereas the English publisher Hamish Hamilton, in class conscious Britain, was more aware of social exclusion – hence The Outsider. Both theories, however, are wrong.

By 1946, the war in Europe had been over for a year, enough time for English language publishers to begin thinking about what literature published in Nazi-occupied Europe was worth translating. Blanche Knopf, who founded Knopf with her husband Alfred in 1915, considered translations of contemporary European literature central to her list. She had been cut off from France during the war, but by February 1945 she was back in touch with Jenny Bradley, her agent in Paris. Jean-Paul Sartre had lauded a new Camus novel called The Plague in a lecture he gave at Harvard in 1945, and word of its young author reached her. Blanche Knopf cabled Paris, asking to see the book, which was still in manuscript. La Peste, with its link to the suffering and heroism of France during the German occupation, was bound to make a splash, and she understood that Knopf might also have to buy L’Étranger in order to get La Peste, which she considered a more exciting and relevant book. Alfred Knopf cabled Bradley in February, but Camus hadn’t yet finished The Plague. Knopf hesitated. In March 1945, he made an offer of $350 for translation rights on The Stranger, with an option to buy rights for The Plague when it was finished.

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The British were more enthusiastic than the Americans. Cyril Connolly, the magazine editor and influential literary critic, as feisty and eccentric in his own way as the irrepressible Knopf, had stated in his 1930s book, The Unquiet Grave, that the European novel was a wasteland, consumed by its own formalism. He saw a whole new start for fiction in Camus’s stark, violent, Algerian tale, which seemed to speak directly to a Britain about to begin the process of decolonisation. Connolly brought The Stranger immediately to the attention of publisher Jamie Hamilton, who purchased British rights from Gallimard in February 1945, with an advance of £75. Hamilton asked Connolly to write an introduction. Hamilton also chose the translator, Stuart Gilbert, a friend of James Joyce who had a good track record translating novels like Man’s Fate by André Malraux. Knopf and Hamilton agreed to share translation costs.

Gilbert worked fast. By September 1945, he’d sent his complete manuscript to Knopf and Hamilton with instructions and a title, The Stranger. On 10 January 1946, Hamilton sent bound, typeset pages of the translation to Blanche Knopf in New York.

But there was a bombshell in his letter, the announcement of a fait accompli: “I send you herewith a set of corrected galleys of Camus’s L’Étranger, which we have decided to call The Outsider, both because we consider this a more striking and appropriate title than The Stranger, and because Hutchinson’s recently called one of their Russian novels The Stranger.”

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In 1945, Hutchinson’s, a rival British publisher, released the translation of what was actually a Polish novel, Maria Kuncewiczowa’s Cudzoziemka, which they had unfortunately entitled The Stranger. At the New York end it was too late to change the title of Camus’s book – Knopf had already typeset it for themselves so that it could be available for the author’s visit to New York in April. The Stranger was printed on the title page, the headers and the spine. They couldn’t redo it.

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Blanche Knopf responded tersely to Hamilton’s announcement: “I had assumed when I received the manuscript, because it had instructions on it from Stuart Gilbert, it was setting copy, we read it very carefully and made any necessary corrections. Certainly if I had known there was a chance of corrected galleys, I would not have set, and wish you might have cabled me the new title, which I can well understand your using.”

Hamilton hadn’t cabled; nor had he telephoned. The two publishers may have shared the English language but they were separated by a vast ocean and very different expectations. In London, it hadn’t occurred to Hamilton that Knopf would go to the trouble of producing the book separately. Was Hamilton being patronising? Was Knopf being presumptuous? The combination of an assumption for control on the British side, and an assumption of independence on the American side, make for a fine allegory of British-American relations going back to the revolution that separated us.

Readers were never informed that the two titles were an accident, and for years, no one has been able to explain why Camus’s L’Étranger is sometimes The Stranger, sometimes The Outsider. And while political questions were not part of the original decision, the titles do resonate differently and lend themselves to conflicting political interpretations. An Algerian critic argued recently, in a review of Sandra Smith’s 2013 translation of L’Étranger, that the title The Outsider is politically scandalous, for it effaces the ambiguity in the French word “étranger” and substitutes a more banal idea of someone being “excluded”. He thought Smith’s 2013 title was new – not realising that the British have used it since 1946.

In the end, I prefer The Stranger to The Outsider. Yet Meursault, the narrator of the novel, is not a foreigner; he is a Frenchman in colonial Algiers, a “petit colon”, and his strangeness is more like the strangeness of an outsider than the strangeness of an alien. So I question my own preference. I wonder if I like The Stranger simply because it’s the title I’m used to. How many readers flinched when Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past became, in a new Viking translation, In Search of Lost Time, even though this is a more direct translation? Then there’s Dostoevsky – The Possessed, The Devils, The Demons – what difference does it make?

Whether the titles of translated works sound familiar or foreign, whether they are literal renderings or poetic departures, their fate is unpredictable. L’Étranger has sold millions of copies in Britain and the US. Kuncewiczowa’s The Stranger, the hidden cause of L’Étranger’s two titles, is still considered a masterpiece in Poland. But the English translation is no longer in print.

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• Alice Kaplan’s Looking for The Outsider: Albert Camus and the Life of a Literary Classic is published by University of Chicago.

'My mother died today. Or maybe it was yesterday, I don't know.' Mersault will not pretend. Unmoved by the death of his mother, he refuses to show sadness just to satisfy the expectations of others. Then, when he commits a random act of violence on a sun-drenched beach in Algiers, his lack of emotion only compounds his guilt in the eyes of society. Albert Camus' portrayal of a man confronting the absurdity of human life became an existentialist classic. Yet it is also a book filled with quiet joy in the physical world, and this new translation, based on listening to recordings of Camus reading aloud, sensitively renders the subtleties and dreamlike atmosphere of l'Etranger.