Displaying node translations
You can use Views, which comes with a front page view you can modify to make it show only nodes for a specific language, and a view for taxonomy/term/%. For taxonomy terms, it is not so straight, as Drupal associates a language to nodes, but not taxonomy terms; it still is possible to show only the nodes associated with the selected taxonomy term, and which are written in a specific language.  

If you install the development snapshot of Views (7.x-3.x-dev), some settings have been renamed; the one that you should change is "filter criteria."