14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft is enriching the collection of language packs available for Internet Explorer 8 RTW. At the end of April 2009, the Redmond company promised that it would deliver the IE8 gold language packs aimed specifically at Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 in mid-May. With the release of the two Multilingual User Interface packages for the two operating systems, the software giant managed to live up to its promise. The IE8 MUI packs are designed to play nice with the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of Windows XP SP2, Windows XP SP3, and Windows Server 2003 SP2.
Vishwac Sena Kannan – IE International program manager, and Jatinder Mann – IE Setup program manager, explained that end users would have to tailor the IE8 MUI pack to the specific language and architecture of their operating systems. In this regard, they will first need to install the IE8 bits in English, and only after deploy the MUI pack matching the OS MUI pack already deployed.
Users need to understand that the IE8 MUI packs are only collections of language-specific resource files that are set up to integrate exclusively with the English version of the browser. Following the integration of the Multilingual User Interface pack, the UI of IE8 will be translated from English into the specific MUI-language.
Kannan and Mann enumerated the languages covered by the Internet Explorer MUI packs:
Internet Explorer 8 MUI pack applicable to Windows XP x86 and Windows Server 2003 x86 for the following languages – Arabic, Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Hong Kong), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Portugal), Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Bulgarian, Croatian, Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Romanian, Slovenian, Slovakian, Thai.
Internet Explorer 8 MUI pack applicable to Windows Server 2003 x64 and Windows XP x64 PRO for the following languages – Chinese (Traditional), Chinese (Simplified), German, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Portuguese (Brazil).
Internet Explorer 8 MUI packs for Windows XP, Windows Server 03 are available for download here.
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).