It's not too hard to change the language in the Language box when you want the list to show in a particular language. Thus, you could select German, then enter the birth place, then change the language selection to English, and then enter the death place.
What is hard is that it's not intuitive that you can do this, so many members might not know that they can. It would be good if there were instructions somewhere - either on the page where the language selection is displayed or on a help page - that let people know they can do this.