While I'm not a Braille user, I have checked out Mainland Chinese Braille. It's based on pinyin, not on characters, usually omits tones, and as such has a lot of ambiguity built in. I think it would be particularly difficult to learn to read Chinese Braille without having a vocabulary wide enough to be able to infer meaning from the syllables. There's also a two cell version which does mark tones, but it doesn't seem to be as widely used.
On the other hand, I believe Taiwanese Braille does mark tones, so if your university has Taiwanese connections, that might easier to learn.
Can't help you on the braille issue, but in general I think this whole "let's study Chinese because they're such an economic powerhouse now!" trend is somewhat misguided. Studying Chinese, for a native speaker of English or for that matter any other Indo-European language, to the level where you can be a translator, is a completely different thing than studying French or Spanish. I don't think it makes much sense to pick it as a third language just like that - if you really want to learn Chinese, it will take years of intense studying even if you don't do anything else in addition. If you're doing it as a third language, it seems unlikely that you'd be able to acquire fluency.
And as for the economy, sure, we do need people in the Western countries who speak Chinese - but we also need people, albeit perhaps in somewhat lower numbers, who speak a variety of other exotic and less exotic languages, most of which would take less time and effort to learn than Chinese, and so might make more sense as a third language for a translator.
Having lived through a couple of these "trends" in my own career I second what the above commenter said. I was nearing the end of my doctoral work in the U.S. when September 11 happened, and suddenly everybody was telling me that I needed to change my specialization to the Islamic world because everybody was going to hire experts in Islam. Which was true for a couple of years, but I was too far along to change, and resented people telling me that my area of expertise should be thrown away just because of a shift in world politics. I pity anyone who started studying Islam in 2002 just because it was on everyone's radar, finished their degree a few years later, and then found the trendiness had passed and it was just as hard to get a job for them as for anyone else. I imagine a similar thing happened to Russian a decade before that. Which is not to diss Arabic or Russian! They're amazing languages that more Westerners need to learn. I'm only saying that if your heart isn't in it and you're doing it for career reasons, you might
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Honestly, those are some of the reasons that I haven't made the decision to learn Chinese, because it is such a difficult and diverse language that it would indeed take many years to master, and I would like to do any language I study justice. I've been thinking about German as well, because I'm part German and have always been interested in learning it. I took a semester of it last year and was fascinated by all the similarities in root words to English, Spanish anf French.
I agree with the above commenters about Chinese. Of course China is growing in power, but Mandarin is too difficult to become a lingua franca, so I'm afraid it won't be of much use, let alone quite difficult to learn it in Braille.
I propose Portuguese. Brazil is growing as well, and the language is really close to Spanish and French. It's so close that you could get confused in the beginning, but it could be useful. smiley face.
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On the other hand, I believe Taiwanese Braille does mark tones, so if your university has Taiwanese connections, that might easier to learn.
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And as for the economy, sure, we do need people in the Western countries who speak Chinese - but we also need people, albeit perhaps in somewhat lower numbers, who speak a variety of other exotic and less exotic languages, most of which would take less time and effort to learn than Chinese, and so might make more sense as a third language for a translator.
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I propose Portuguese. Brazil is growing as well, and the language is really close to Spanish and French. It's so close that you could get confused in the beginning, but it could be useful. smiley face.
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