Same experience here. In college ( portuguese speaking country ), the teachers forbade us to buy translated books. We had to work with the english editions only, and I'm lucky this was the case having seen some of these translated books later.

It still is that way. And whats even more maddening: you have to replace the commas in the formulas with semicolons. Probably because the comma is used in numbers in Dutch. It has driven me nuts more than once though!

Indeed, that's one problem I had with it recently—with formulas. I search the web on how to do some thing, and then have to stare at the list of functions to find the same ones in my language. Doesn't help that functions are named like it's the 80s, with arbitrary abbreviations.

That's still the case today.

Designing for the illiterate (or inebriated) is a nice goal, but designing for people to change their app into a language they cannot read, and then expecting it to all be easily usable, is not really a particularly great design goal. In that instance, a button could have a single word that 99.9% of people can read, but if you've changed it to Spanish it may render the button incomprehensible. I personally can't think of a single app I use that is completely usable without basic reading comprehension. I'd be curious about examples though (assuming reasonable complexity) because it'd be some potentially useful design that I'd be interested in seeing (and potentially using).

Adding to this, I'm curious how someone who cannot recognise the characters of their languages would use input fields, too? I don't think I know of many input fields which are particularly accessible if one doesn't recognise language characters without using speech recognition (which kind of sidesteps the issue).

I know this sounds awful, but perhaps Uber drivers don't want drunk people who might vomit in their cars?

How do you understand something like 'withdraw, with conversion' or 'withdraw, let your bank handle the conversion', without language? Is there an obvious image or button shape that'd signify this without prior knowledge? Curious, not sure I've seen an instance where this is obvious from any other cue.

To expand on this: the mapping between images and other cues to a precise meaning is often actually pretty poor. To correctly navigate using images you often have to have prior knowledge, with the exception of the most downright obvious images or visual cues possible. On the other hand, text can have essentially arbitrary precision (although past a certain point it becomes difficult to parse) - and is thus actually often superior for first-use (or infrequent use) scenarios. The ideal is to have the best communication possible, and while I'm not sure as to the extent that Uber reaches that goal, text being unreadable and the app being unnavigable because you changed the language is, in my view, more on you than on the app developers.