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There seem to be several ways in French to translate out of town, but which captures the general idea of just being away, not necessarily in the countryside (à la campagne), or in another town (dans une autre ville), or somewhere near town (à l'extérieur?)?
And, to be clear, I don't mean out on the town, which is a completely different activity.
There is no word-for-word equivalent to out of town when it boils down to indicating someone is away. In every day language, some standards phrases would be:
Il n'est pas là
Il est parti
Il s'est absenté (a bit more formal)
Il est en déplacement (used in business contexts, for jobs that involve a lot of traveling)
You could come across il n'est pas en ville, but the meaning is more restricted than in English: it implies that this person usually stays in the city, and that they are temporarily gone to the countryside or to another city, or even just to the suburbs ("en ville" often implies "downtown" in French).
"Hors de ville" is not a locution in the language; all you can find are normal free constructions: hors de la ville, hors des villes, hors d'une ville. However, there exists a meaning of the preposition "hors" that is proper ;
(TLFi) 1. En dehors de (un espace)
- Hors barrière
- Ce pan de chemise hors la culotte du gamin.
- Les bêtes broutent hors les bergeries, mais ne s'éparpillent plus.
- Les Templiers avaient le leur [un port] non loin de la place de Grève, et la rue du Temple avait été initialement ouverte pour relier à ce port leurs établissements hors murs, situés dans la région nord.
In the examples one notices "hors barrière" et "hors murs" in which no article figures; those are ready made locutions, issued from "hors la barrière" "hors des murs"; after some time of using them a lot they have been shorten, so that quite possibly le long form is not correct (I couldn't assert whether yes or no, though).
You'd have to say then "hors la ville".
However, the proposed translation belongs to the literary style; in everyday language a simple phrase is used, « pas en ville », « hors de la ville », according to the context.
after a verb, as a complement
as an adjectival locution
An ngram tends to confirm those claims.
In this second case, one can sometimes hear this ;
It's not correct, but is acceptable when repeating for a person who has difficulties in French, particularly a foreigner; nevertheless, the full sentence is not repeated often: « pas en ville », « les propriétés pas en ville ».
Il existe aussi l'expression être à l'extérieur qui selon le contexte a différentes significations, et qui se rapproche quelque peu de la signification de out of town. Il est à l'extérieur peut signifier par exemple
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I chose to do this, after giving my original question some more thought; hence my second question. I will reframe it in deference to @Stéphane Gimenez and @Toto who chose to delete it (in contravention of Stack Exchange's advice).
Perhaps hors de ville is a suitable phrase to mean away somewhere not close to town.
