No less than 43 localized versions of Internet Explorer 8 are currently available for download from Microsoft. The Redmond company made the first 25 available with the initial release to web of IE8 in March 2009, and added support for an extra 18 languages on April 24. But in addition to offering IE8 in 43 languages, the software giant has also delivered the language packs associated with the localized versions as standalone downloads. Users have to be aware of the fact that IE8 language packs are designed to work in concordance with the underlying matching OS language pack, which has to be installed on the Windows platform.

“If you had already installed Internet Explorer 8 in English and you had an underlying Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 operating system in any of the [supported] languages, you can experience localized Internet Explorer 8 by installing the Internet Explorer 8 Language pack that matches your operating system language(s). Users who have more than one Language pack installed on their machine could benefit from installing Language packs as well,” revealed Vishwac Sena Kannan, International Program Manager, Internet Explorer.

Microsoft provided the list with all languages “spoken” by Internet Explorer 8: Arabic, Bosnian (Cyrillic), Bosnian (Latin), Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Hong Kong), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Romanian, Russian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

With the Language Packs for IE8 RTW (released to web) users will be able to install and then use language specific resource files. Essentially, the graphical user interface elements of Internet Explorer 8 will be translated into the language associated with the LP installed on top of Windows with the mirroring MUI. Microsoft plans to release an additional 20 languages for IE8 in the future, taking the number of localized versions up to 63.

For the time being the Internet Explorer 8 Language Packs are designed to integrate exclusively with Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008. Multilingual User Interface packs for Internet Explorer 8 RTW running on top of Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 will only be provided in May 2008.

Internet Explorer 8 Language Packs for Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 are available for download here.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) RTW is available for download here (for 32-bit and 64-bit flavors of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008).