About Orientes do Português

Orientes do Português

Orientes do Português is an annual, peer-reviewed academic journal co-published in Macau by the Centre for Portuguese Studies of Macao Polytechnic University — formerly the Macao Polytechnic Institute — and the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto in Portugal. Its first issue appeared in December 2019, and its seventh edition had been published by 2026. The Macao Special Administrative Region government describes it as the first Portuguese-language international academic journal in Asia. Issued simultaneously in print (ISSN 2707-3122) and electronic form (eISSN 2707-3130), it publishes research on Portuguese language and culture and on the teaching of Portuguese, with authors from Macao, mainland China, Portugal, Brazil and other countries, in support of Macao's role as a platform between China and the Portuguese-speaking world.

A first for Asia: a Portuguese-language international journal

When the Macao Polytechnic Institute and the University of Porto jointly presented Orientes do Português, the Macao SAR government presented the launch as a milestone: the first international academic journal in Asia published in Portuguese. That status is the journal's defining fact. Portuguese is a world language spoken across Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, yet scholarly publishing in Portuguese has historically been centred in Portugal and Brazil. An annual journal edited from Macao — a city where Portuguese is an official language alongside Chinese, and where it has been present for centuries — gives scholars working in Asia a peer-reviewed venue in Portuguese itself, rather than requiring them to publish about Portuguese in another language. The government announcement stressed the practical aim: to better promote research results on Portuguese language and culture and to facilitate the sharing of academic resources.

Publishers in Macao and Porto

The journal is published by the Centre for Portuguese Studies of Macao Polytechnic Institute — now part of Macao Polytechnic University — together with the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. That pairing is built into everything the journal does. The Macao centre is the institute's specialist unit for Portuguese studies; it also produces Portuguese teaching materials and academic monographs covering Portuguese teaching, linguistics, literature, culture and history, and it runs the online platform for Portuguese teaching resources on which the journal is hosted. The University of Porto's Faculty of Arts brings one of Portugal's major humanities faculties into the editorship. Submissions for later issues were handled jointly, with calls inviting papers for consideration by the Macao side and the University of Porto Faculty of Arts and Humanities — a genuinely binational editorial arrangement rather than a single-institution journal with foreign advisers.

First issue, December 2019, and an international authorship

The first issue of Orientes do Português was published in December 2019. According to the Macao SAR government, it included authors from Macao, mainland China, Portugal, Brazil, South Korea, Denmark and other regions, and it received positive responses and appreciation from scholars in the field of Portuguese language and from international academia. That spread of contributors in a first issue is significant: the journal was international in practice from the start, not only in aspiration. The electronic version was launched online free of charge on the institute's website, and a call for papers for the second volume followed, running until 12 July 2020. An annual journal lives or dies by that cycle — issue, call, submissions, review, next issue — and Orientes do Português established it immediately.

The second issue and a widening circle

The second issue, published online in April 2021, showed the circle widening further. It contained an article on the life and work of João Malaca Casteleiro, a Portuguese linguist and former academic adviser to the Macao Polytechnic Institute who had died the previous year — an early sign of the journal's role in recording the scholarly community around Portuguese studies in Macao. Contributors came from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, Beijing Foreign Studies University and Sun Yat-sen University in China, and the University of Oxford in Britain, alongside the founding institutions. The institute noted at the time that the contributions showed the journal's academic influence expanding, and that the influence of research by Chinese and Portuguese scholars was increasing internationally. The issue could be read free of charge, and a deadline of 31 August was set for submissions to the third issue.

Subject matter: language, culture and teaching

Orientes do Português publishes research on Portuguese language and culture and on Portuguese teaching. Those three strands recur throughout its institutional setting. The Centre for Portuguese Studies promotes Portuguese language and culture and deepens research in Portuguese and related fields; its wider output includes the Global Portuguese textbook series, teaching materials for Chinese learners covering writing, vocabulary, phonetics and literature, and the Blue Book report on the development of Portuguese teaching in higher institutions in China. Within that ecosystem, the journal is the research flagship — the place where peer-reviewed studies sit alongside the centre's textbooks, conference papers from the International Forum of Portuguese Language Teaching and Research in China, and monographs. Research on how Portuguese degree programmes in Macao handle intercultural content in their curricula, for example, is exactly the kind of scholarship — Portuguese teaching examined where Chinese and Portuguese education meet — that the journal exists to circulate.

The seventh edition and the classroom question

By 2026, Macao Polytechnic University and the University of Porto had co-published the seventh edition of Orientes do Português. The university presented that edition as reinforcing Macao's role as a precision liaison between China and Portuguese-speaking countries, deepening academic research within the Portuguese-language sphere and promoting its international dissemination, and as consolidating academic and cultural ties between China and Lusophone countries. Around the same period, the two universities jointly organised an online academic seminar, “Eastern Portuguese in the Classroom: Challenges and Prospects”, exploring the current situation and future development of Portuguese language teaching in the Eastern context, with particular focus on the challenges faced by native Chinese students learning Portuguese. Papers from that seminar — including work on challenges Chinese students face in learning Portuguese grammar and discourse, and on choosing verb tenses — were included in the seventh issue as an academic special issue, tying the journal directly to live teaching research.

Macao's Sino-Portuguese platform role

The journal cannot be understood apart from the role Macao is assigned in China's external relations. Macao is promoted as a “Sino-Portuguese Platform” and a base for training Chinese-Portuguese bilingual talent, connecting China with Portuguese-speaking countries in the context of the Belt and Road Initiative and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Orientes do Português is a scholarly instrument of that platform: an annual, peer-reviewed journal, in Portuguese, edited in Macao with a Portuguese university, read free of charge by academics and students in China and in Portuguese-speaking parts of the world. Its publishers present each new edition in those terms — as deepening research in the Portuguese-language sphere and strengthening the academic and cultural ties on which the platform depends — rather than as a purely internal university publication.

Free electronic access and the teaching-resources platform

From the beginning, the electronic version of Orientes do Português has been available free of charge on the Macao Polytechnic website. The Centre for Portuguese Studies later folded the journal into a broader digitalisation effort: an e-platform for Portuguese language teaching resources carrying the Global Portuguese textbooks, Sino-Portuguese academic monographs and the journal itself, organised into teaching materials; journals and essay collections; and books and reference works. More than thirty Portuguese textbooks and academic publications were launched on that platform, with a number of e-books free to download. For an annual journal from a small territory, that free digital presence is what makes international readership realistic: a scholar in Brazil, Portugal or mainland China can read each issue without a subscription, and teachers can draw on the same platform's textbooks and reference works alongside it.

Institutions behind the journal today

The Macao partner has itself changed since the first issue: the Macao Polytechnic Institute became Macao Polytechnic University, and its Portuguese work now sits within structures such as the Faculty of Languages and Translation and the Portuguese Language Teaching and Research Center, whose director Rui Jorge Gama Fernandes appears alongside Dean Zhang Yunfeng in the universities' joint seminar activity. Zhang Yunfeng, as director of the Centre for Portuguese Studies, publicly led the centre's work of promoting Portuguese language and culture and digitising its publications. On the Portuguese side, the University of Porto's engagement runs from its Faculty of Arts to its vice-presidential level. Through seven editions since December 2019, that partnership has sustained something no other Asian institution had produced before it: a peer-reviewed, Portuguese-language international journal, published annually in print and online from Macau, a region of China where the language it studies is part of daily official life.