You should consider link authority, and even that is probably dead in the near future. The thing is, links are not that important in the near-to-long future because Google will eventually look at other stats to rate the relavance of websites.

For now, links are still important and you should look first if the sites that are linking to you are sites with good rankings for important keywords. That's the main thing. As for language specific sites, I think the same applies. You should look for sites that rate well in language specific search engines.