What we choose to carry forward: reflections from SEALS 35

Returning as daughter, researcher, and founder

In June, I returned to Asia with my family.

This journey felt different from my previous trips home. I returned not only as a daughter looking forward to spending time with family and friends, but also as a researcher and founder preparing to present at SEALS 35 in Singapore.

At the conference, I presented work co-authored with Chiu Ying Sung: “Digital Revitalization with Indigenous Sovereignty: A CARE-Compliant, Privacy-Preserving TTS Framework for the Rukai Language.”¹

After several years of working outside academia, standing before researchers studying Southeast Asia’s lesser-studied languages was deeply meaningful to me.

It reminded me why I began Narrovosoft.

Technology should not merely demonstrate what is technically possible. It should also help us consider what is worth carrying forward, who should benefit from it, and who has the authority to decide how it is used.

Culture as a pillar of sustainability

Sustainability is often discussed through energy systems, infrastructure, materials, and environmental technologies. These are essential, but they are not the whole picture.

Culture has been advocated as a fourth, interconnected pillar of sustainable development.² Multilingualism also contributes to social inclusion, cultural continuity, and the participation of Indigenous and marginalized communities.³

Languages do more than label the world. They carry stories, relationships, memories, and place-based knowledge accumulated across generations.

They can preserve knowledge about land, water, biodiversity, food systems, social relationships, and ways of living within particular environments.⁴

From documentation to application

A substantial body of this knowledge has already been recorded through decades of linguistic and anthropological fieldwork. Audio recordings, transcriptions, dictionaries, narratives, field notes, and other materials can now be found in digital language archives.

However, preservation is only one step.

Materials stored in an archive are not automatically easy to discover, understand, reuse, or apply in language education. They may require further transcription, translation, annotation, organization, technical processing, and community review before they can become meaningful resources for learners and future generations.⁵

This gap between documentation and application is one of the questions Narrovosoft is now exploring.

How can existing materials be responsibly transformed into educational stories, language-learning resources, speech technologies, and other accessible formats?

How can we help these records create greater value for language communities, while respecting the original consent, access conditions, cultural protocols, and authority of the people represented in them?

Where technology becomes both promising and dangerous

Speech and AI technologies can improve access and create new possibilities for language learning. The same technologies can also extract voices, remove knowledge from its social context, or reproduce cultural materials in ways that speakers never agreed to.

Indigenous language technology must therefore be guided by community authority, collective benefit, responsibility, privacy, and ethics, not only by technical performance or the amount of available data.⁶

What comes next

The conversations and feedback I received at SEALS 35 strengthened Narrovosoft’s direction.

Narratelica’s Sustainability Series will not focus only on widely used languages or environmental topics. We want to contribute to linguistic and cultural sustainability by developing stories with communities, in their own languages, and by helping children encounter knowledge through the voices in which it has been passed down.

We are beginning with a Chinese and Rukai edition of our first Sustainability Series picture book.

This is not a mission Narrovosoft can or should pursue alone.

We hope to collaborate with linguists, language educators, speakers, elders, archives, and community partners. Together, we want to explore how documented knowledge can be responsibly organized, applied, and passed forward, according to what communities choose to preserve, teach, and share.

Environmental sustainability and cultural continuity belong to the same responsibility.

Both concern what we choose to carry forward for the next generation.