template files

My front page is a static page.

I would like not to use index.php, so I am thinking of another php file, in the template hierarchy.

I have created categories for pages (using “Post Tags and Categories for Pages plugin”), and give the page the category “General” but category-general.php doesn’t work.

The only one I got working is page.php, but since my site will be multi-lingual, I assume every front page will have different slugs, so page-slug is not a good candidate.

May I have some hints on how the template hierarchy works?