Link building is a large topic. One thing, however, is that people usually forget how different things work in different target regions and languages.
When working on your link popularity in different languages, you may have less competition depending of your market and keyphrases you are promoting. But you have to become picky when choosing appropriate link partners.
If you do a link building campaign to promote your French website or any other languages, it is very important to do it in that language. It is worthless to have links on English websites if your site is not in that language. You won’t be able to put your anchor text nor will it be relevant for users on these sites.
Forget that you have a website in English while promoting your other languages. Having a website in English that already has good link juice (links to your site) will help you but not as much as doing a campaign in the language you are aiming. Get links from websites located in your target location and language.
Requesting for links must be done in the native language of the country of origin. You can’t simply say “Me da un link por favor?” In many countries where English is not the first language, owners of the website owner or the webmaster could not respond because they think it as a spam email. Others do not respond because they see it rude when someone does business using another person’s language.
This is very true in France and Brazil for example, but anything can still happen since it is not a rule that is engraved in stone. This is one of the many reasons for the existence of niches in SEM/SEO. So I suggest you outsource to local professionals.