Saving a node with nodereference on a multilingual site gives 'this post can't be referenced' error

This is a really specific problem that occurs on sites with multiple languages and cck nodereferences.
When you use the node service to save a node that has a nodereference and is in a different language than the default language, you get an error.

I came across this problem by using the deployment module.
Both sites have two languages, dutch and french. With dutch as the default language.
When I deployed a french node with a node reference to an other french node it failed with the error:
%name: this post can't be referenced.

This error is generated by nodereference_field in nodereference.module
It generates a list of possible nodereferences (_nodereference_potential_references)
by executing the query

SELECT DISTINCT n.nid, n.title AS node_title, n.type AS node_type 
FROM {node} n 
WHERE (n.language ='nl' OR n.language ='' OR n.language IS NULL) 
  AND ( (n.type = '%s' OR n.type = '%s') 
  AND (n.nid IN (%d)) )ORDER BY n.title, n.type

In the first WHERE part the current language is used. In this case dutch: (n.language ='nl' OR n.language ='' OR n.language IS NULL)
But because the referenced node is in french, no results are found. This results in the error.

I think it is better to set the current active language to the language of the node that is going to be saved.
So I added

global $language;
$languages = language_list();
$language = isset($languages[$edit['language']]) ? $languages[$edit['language']] : $language;

to node_service_save. This solved the problem.