zemj, you are on the right track. In fact, if your goal is to localize the Reader to Czech, or Chinese, or Esperanto, or any other language, you can look at the solution the Kiev hackers came up with, and make your own localization.
The reason for it is that the hackers made each menu string essentially a single character Unicode string consisting of one special Unicode character. These special characters are normally not printable, so you can make any font "character" correspond to them. The newly created font "characters" are composite symbols making up entire strings. So, all you need to do is make your own special font, and you are all set.
I thought that to be a rather amazing solution, as it didn't require relocating and overwriting the strings, editing ARM binaries, or any such ugly stuff.
You are correct, the Unicode for EE 80 82 ends up E002 - read
some Wikipeadia articles about UTF-8 string encoding. The first bits of the "characters" tell the length of the character in bytes:
1110xxxx 10yyyyyy 10zzzzzz is interpreted as
xxxxyyyy yyzzzzzz
The negative here is that every new FW release will probably require re-editing kbook.so (and some XML files), which is a bit of a pain.