The first council meeting of the Academic Library Alliance between Macao Special Administrative Region and Portuguese-speaking Countries (ABAMAPLP) and the Academic Library Alliance for Portuguese Language Resources between Macao Special Administrative Region and Mainland China (ABAMACHINA) will be held at the University of Macau (UM) on 17 to 19 October. The meeting aims to realise resource sharing and promote the development of the alliances. UM will also hold the First International Forum on Chinese and Portuguese Languages to create a global platform for interaction and exchange between the Portuguese and Chinese languages.

Members of ABAMAPLP and ABAMACHINA include UM and 40 other universities from different countries, among which universities from mainland China all offer Portuguese language programmes. The two alliances are committed to creating an interlibrary loan and document delivery service mechanism and a joint catalogue, as well as setting up an online portal at UM that pools together Chinese and Portuguese language resources provided by the members for sharing within the alliances.

In addition, the First International Forum on Chinese and Portuguese Languages, jointly organised by the Department of Portuguese of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities and the Confucius Institute at UM with assistance from the UM library, will be held concurrently. The forum will comprise three thematic sessions, namely ‘Teaching Portuguese as a Foreign Language’, to be moderated by João Veloso, head of the Department of Portuguese at UM; ‘Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language’, to be moderated by Chen Zhong, deputy director of the Confucius Institute at UM; and ‘Linguistics, Literature, Culture, and Translation Studies of Chinese and Portuguese’, to moderated by Zhang Jing, professor in the Department of Portuguese at UM. A total of 43 papers have been accepted by the forum after peer review, and three renowned scholars will deliver speeches at the forum. The authors of the papers and the speakers are mainly from the member universities of the two alliances.

The opening ceremony of the two abovementioned events will also include the presentation of the Henrique de Senna Fernandes Academic Prize for the Best Portuguese Thesis for the 2021/2022 and 2022/2023 academic years. Prizes will be awarded to three best doctoral theses from UM’s Department of Portuguese and one best master’s thesis in Portuguese from UM’s Faculty of Law. The prizes are funded by the University of Macau Development Foundation and are launched on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of Henrique de Senna Fernandes, a renowned Macanese writer and lawyer. Moreover, Maria José Grosso, a professor who has taught at the University of Lisbon and UM, will be presented with a book by her colleagues at the opening ceremony as a token of appreciation for her dedication to the teaching of the Portuguese language in Lisbon, Macao, and other places.