When a anchor is hovered in this menu it should turn its background white. It works in Firefox and Chrome but in IE the words just disappear and the background doesn't turn white.

CSS:

#lang {
    float: right;
    padding: 0 0 0 0;
    margin: 50px 25px 0 0;
    width: 285px;
}
#lang li {
    font-size: 10px;
    float: right;
}
#lang li a#english, #spanish, #chinese {
    color: #FFF;
    float: right;
    padding-right: 20px;
    padding-top: 2px;
    padding-bottom: 2px;
    width: 200px; /* ie fix */
}
#lang li a#english {
    padding-left: 231px;
}
#lang li a#spanish {
    padding-left: 228px;
}
#lang li a#chinese {
    padding-left: 219px;
}
#lang li a:hover {
background: #FFF;
color: #444;
}
#lang li.current a {
    background: #FFF !important;
    color: #444 !important;
    cursor: default;
}

HTML:

<ul id="lang">
                <li <?php if($lang_file=='lang.en.php') {echo 'class="current"';} ?>><a id="english" href="index.php?lang=en">english</a></li>
                <li <?php if($lang_file=='lang.es.php') {echo 'class="current"';} ?>><a id="spanish" href="index.php?lang=es">español</a></li>
                <li <?php if($lang_file=='lang.zh-tw.php') {echo 'class="current"';} ?>><a id="chinese" href="index.php?lang=zh-tw">??(??)</a></li>
                <li <?php if($lang_file=='lang.zh-cn.php') {echo 'class="current"';} ?>><a id="chinese" href="index.php?lang=zh-cn">??(??)</a></li>
            </ul>