Zhang Chaoyang, president of Phoenix Publishing and Media Group, and Juergen Jakob Becker, the managing director of the Deutsche Ubersetzerfonds (German translators fund), signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Strategic Cooperation for a Sino-German translation project at the 76th Frankfurt Book Fair that closed on Oct 20.

Both sides agreed to support the long-term operation of the Sino-German Translation Workshop by providing resources, financial aid, and marketing assistance for its projects. They will use the workshop to enhance Sino-German cooperation in translation and publishing projects over the next three to five years.

The cooperation memorandum was based on the fruitful results achieved at the Sino-German Translation Workshop held in Nanjing in September, which, jointly organized by the PPMG and the DU, aims to deepen exchange and cooperation between China and Germany in the fields of literary, cultural, and academic translation.

In recent years, the PPMG, one of the leading publishing enterprises in China, has had close cultural exchanges with Germany, the third-largest publishing country in the world, having multiple exchanges with the Frankfurt Book Fair GmbH, and the German Schiller Society, and held publishing trade trainings in Germany.

Yilin Press under the PPMG has introduced works by German Nobel Prize winners Gunter Grass and Thomas Mann, important contemporary German philosopher Jurgen Habermas, sociologist Karl Mannheim, and historian Sebastian Haffner, and translated and published bestsellers like The Reader by Bernhard Schlink.

In the past five years, the PPMG has imported 53 books from Germany and exported 38 copyrights to Germany.