The Greek translation of MIUI V5 — Xiaomi Miui Hellas

In the summer of 2014 everything revolved around ROMs. This is the story of the first complete Greek translation of Xiaomi's MIUI V5 — work that started from the community and eventually reached every Greek retail phone.

Community logo, from the MIUI-XML-5.0-Greek repository.

The translation

I translated over 35,000 lines of code back then — the XML strings hiding behind all of MIUI V5, from the system applications to the launcher and the browser. It was many commits of work, together with miui_art (Dimitris Dagalidis), owner of xiaomi-miui.gr — the biggest and best community for Xiaomi/MIUI devices then and now alike, covering Mi phones, Redmi and many more brands.

The code lived in the MIUI-XML-5.0-Greek repository — the moment our work left the private test bench and became a public, open translation project.

Why it mattered

At a later date, InfoQuest — the official importer of the phones back then — took this translation as a base to provide a proper Greek language for the ROM across every phone that landed from then on. A community of volunteers wrote, in other words, the Greek that hundreds of thousands of users saw on their screens.