Wildlife management

The sixth entry is la dispersion des jeunes, and its noun is one French word doing a job that English ecology has deliberately split in two. When a young lynx or wolf leaves the range it was born in and goes looking for one of its own, a biologist writing in English calls that « dispersal »: the act of moving away, a process with a start and an end. « Dispersion » is kept for something else — the way individuals end up arranged across the land, clumped, even or random, which is a pattern rather than a journey. Statistics and optics use « dispersion » too, for the spread of figures and for light fanning into colours. French makes no such cut. La dispersion des graines is seed dispersal, la dispersion des jeunes is natal dispersal, la dispersion des données is the spread of the data, and la dispersion de la lumière is what a prism does. So a translator has to ask each time whether the sentence describes animals on the move or a picture of where they are. On this page the answer is always movement, and the word wanted is « dispersal ».