That's an interesting question indeed. I never saw a conclusive study on this topic, however, it seems that the answer would be: unique, genuine, high quality links will always be of use, especially if the topic of the page is relevant (just like in the example with foreign travel communities linking to travel websites in English) even though it would provide less value because of the anchor and surrounding text being in other language. How exactly less, that's still questionable. I would not concentrate on acquiring such links deliberately, but would not fight against them as well.