Mommy?

Someone in my class yesterday mentioned how the American versions of Harry Potter have "Mom" instead of "Mum", and that reminded me of this.

I recently read The Stranger (having read my first Camus novel for the NL this past winter I resolved to read more, and finally did). The translation I got was a new(ish) one by Matthew Ward, an "American" one instead of the (apparently) standard one by the Briton, Stuart Gilbert. In his introduction, Ward says, among other ruminations about Camus's style and how to translate it:

No sentence in French literature in English translation is better known than the opening sentence of The Stranger. It has become a sacred cow of sorts, and I have changed it. In his notebooks Camus recorded the observation that "the curious feeling the son has for his mother constitutes all his sensibility." And Sartre, in his "Explication de L'Etranger" goes out of his way to point out Meursault's use of the child's word "Maman" when speaking of his mother. To use the more removed, adult word "Mother" is, I believe, to change nature of Meursault's curious feeling for her. It is to change his very sensibility.

Which is all very fine, but the actual sentence as he translates it is:

Maman died today.

(Aujourd'hui, maman est morte.)

Now the word Maman, is, for me, not a Francophone - in fact, barely able to get by in simple French - even more removed than "Mother" would have been. Maman may be "the child's word" but it doesn't mean "mommy" to me. Yes, I'm aware that mère is "mother", ma mère "my mother", but Maman is a foreign word. There's no sense of register attached to it. Hunting around the Internet I find indications that maman is like papa, but it's intellectual knowledge (and I only did it because I read his introduction).

If his intent was to restore the quality of childishness to Meursault's relationship with his mother, using "Maman" failed utterly (for me, at any rate) to do it. In fact, reading "Maman" this American feels it as even more formal than "Mother".

I'd have used "Mama", myself.