Backdrop really ought to have, or be able to have, placeholders for admin form inputs. More and more designers hide form labels and rely on placeholders to provide information in a clean manner.
Perhaps the easiest place to visual this working is on the User registration/login and password forms. Here's an example:
Whilst it's feasible to add placeholders per input field and form through your theme template.php file, surely we should be taking full advantage of HTML5's features and have this in core for all admin forms?

Recent comments
There is a Drupal 7 contrib module that "lets the administrator see all administration pages in her preferred language" and which could be ported to Backdrop: https://www.drupal.org/project/...
Allow admin to select admin language seperate from front end language (multilingual)
@stpaultim – You're right: my approach affects also the main menu. I guess, because menus are also considered as user interface (not as content). @findlabnet – If I didn't miss anything,...
Allow admin to select admin language seperate from front end language (multilingual)
Go to the account edit of the desired user. On the horizontal tab below "Region and Language," select "English" or another language. WFM.
Allow admin to select admin language seperate from front end language (multilingual)