DLyons Oct 12, 2016:

@Chris "Low variability" seems to me the most natural way to express the sense. Maybe in later phrases "dispersion" is appropriate, but here it just feels slightly out of place (and "scatter" even more so). "Standard deviation" is of course technically correct, but IMO not contextually so.

chris collister Oct 11, 2016:

@ Donal IMO, your suggestion strays a bit too far from the text, especially given the later occurrences of "dispersées".

DLyons Oct 11, 2016:

It's descriptive rather than technical text. "Over this period, it had low variability".

chris collister Oct 10, 2016:

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_dispersion

Scott de Lesseps (asker) Oct 10, 2016:

Thanks for all the comments. Chris, I was unsure about "weakly dispersed about the mean". It sounded a abit strange to me, but then I'm not in expert in the field of Statistics. I appreciate the feedback.

M.A.B. Oct 10, 2016:

Anyway, "scatter" is what is often used.
Regarding around / about: here it's "around"
http://farside.ph.utexas.edu/teaching/sm1/lectures/node18.ht...

chris collister Oct 10, 2016:

If we are to split hairs, the usual terminology is "about the mean" rather than "around".

Didier Fourcot Oct 10, 2016:

mathematical wording or not? French does not seem so scientific, the meaning is that the different values along the years are respectively rather close, very close or rather far from the computed average; this could be all what the reader wants to know.

"dispersé" could suggest a statistical wording, refering to the concept of "dispersion statistique":
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispersion_statistique
however there is no specific concept of average deviation, MAD, standard deviation or variance, so I doubt that you have to use the concept of "statistical dispersion" in target text, not to mention other mathematical concepts that are definitely not in source

BrigitteHilgner Oct 10, 2016:

closely distributed around the mean would be my choice
See:
http://www.shca.ed.ac.uk/esh/numeracy/breakout6.html

Tony M Oct 10, 2016:

@ Asker Not being an expert in the field, I think your 'narrowly' sounds reasonable to me — though it may be a word to use with caution, in view of its other common usage "narrowly escaped death" etc.
Just one thought, that might help with some instances: I often find that certain expressions in FR are better 'turned round' to be a negative in EN; so for example, 'peu' might become 'not much'; this can be a useful technique for getting myself out of a hole ;-)

I also wonder if here you might want to consider the possibility of using 'distributed' — cf. statistical expressions like 'normal distribution' etc.