Chinese publishers and translators have been lauded at the 2011 Fu Lei Translation and Publishing Awards held in Beijing on Saturday night. The top award is named after Chinese translator and art critic Fu Lei (1908-1966), who is best known for his translations of Voltaire, Balzac and Romain Rolland. The annual awards honor the year's most outstanding translation works from French to Chinese, and aim to promote the translation and publication of French books in China.

This year's prize went to Jin Longge for his translation of French author Patrick Modiano's novel In the cafe of lost youth (Dans le café de la jeunesse perdue) published by People's Literature Publishing House and Shanghai 99 Readers' Culture.

Yang Yaping, Zhao Jingli and Yin Wei also received awards for co-translating Daniel Roche's The Enlightenment of France (La France des Lumières) published by East China Normal University Press. France's ambassador to China, Sylvie Bermann, attended the ceremony and presented the awards to winners.

Hong Huang, a magazine publisher and celebrity blogger, hosted the awards ceremony and took photos of winners later uploaded to her Weibo microblog account.

The first award ceremony was held in 2009 and attended by Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, who won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Olivier Rolin, a famous French writer who has had two of his books translated into Chinese, attended this year's awards. Rolin said at the ceremony that Chinese was one of the world's oldest and most revered languages.

The judging panel for the awards consisted six Chinese and six French bilingual linguists. The publisher and translator of the same translation work split the award's prize money of $10,634.