Interesting article on UX Matters, well worth reading, especially the idea that global design research can take for a better user experience in all languages:

Label Placement in Austrian Forms, with Some Lessons for English Forms

What is perhaps underplayed here is the cultural influence of how people worked with forms in the past, and how a proper global user-centered design process needs to address this issue and move usability gains (in the enterprise space, productivity especially) in the right direction.