The decline of proficient practitioners poses an existential threat to numerous ancient writing systems, risking the loss of the cultural heritage they encode. Among these systems is Sawndip, a logographic script whose computational preservation faces severe challenges due to the scarcity of standardized corpora. In this paper, we present the first systematic framework for low-resource Sawndip-Chinese translation and bilingual conversational modeling. We introduce a newly curated dataset comprising sentence-level Sawndip-Chinese parallel data and character-level lexical definitions. Building upon this foundation, we propose a knowledge-enhanced supervised fine-tuning paradigm that incorporates lexical knowledge during training. To address the additional challenges of Chinese-to-Sawndip generation, we further develop a manually curated template-based substructure substitution strategy for synthesizing reverse-direction data. Bilingual conversational data is then constructed through a dimension-conditioned dialogue generation and multi-candidate back-translation pipeline, enabling controllable and diverse dialogue synthesis. Experimental results show that our final unified model effectively supports both Sawndip-Chinese translation and bilingual conversational abilities. Ultimately, this work provides a foundational reference for the digital preservation of Sawndip, offering broader insights into the computational documentation of globally-endangered languages.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) techniques have proven to be effective in integrating up-to-date information, mitigating hallucinations, and enhancing response quality, particularly in specialized domains. While many RAG approaches have been proposed to enhance large language models through query-dependent retrievals, these approaches still suffer from their complex implementation and prolonged response times. Typically, a RAG workflow involves multiple processing steps, each of which can be executed in various ways. Here, we investigate existing RAG approaches and their potential combinations to identify optimal RAG practices. Through extensive experiments, we suggest several strategies for deploying RAG that balance both performance and efficiency. Moreover, we demonstrate that multimodal retrieval techniques can significantly enhance question-answering capabilities about visual inputs and accelerate the generation of multimodal content using a “retrieval as generation” strategy.