A great deal of good research dies in the last mile. The study is sound, the findings are real, and they come to rest in a report that the people who could act on them never read. We tend to treat that as someone else's problem, the decision-maker's failure to engage. It is more honest to treat it as part of the work that simply did not get done.
Knowledge translation is the discipline of closing that gap; of turning evidence into something a specific audience can actually use, and use in time. It is often misread as "dumbing down," which gets it backwards. Translating a finding into plain language, the right format, and the decision-maker's actual question is harder than writing the technical report, not easier, because it requires you to know what matters and to let the rest go.
Research that nobody uses is not finished; it is abandoned at the last mile.
There is a useful spectrum here. The weakest approach is pure push: produce the report and hope it lands. Better is pull: start from what the decision-maker actually needs and shape the work to answer it. Best is exchange: a relationship in which the people who will use the evidence help shape what gets studied and how it gets told, so that by the time the findings arrive, there is already someone waiting to act on them.
The practical moves are modest and they compound: lead with the "so what," match the format to the audience rather than your habits, and deliver it when the decision is being made, not three months after. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the difference between research that informs a choice and research that decorates a shelf.