We also could think about a totally different website, using templates for all languages (i.e in a templates/ directory) and some translation files ( i.e languages/en/ for english texts). Then we'll juste have to include the right texts in a template.
Thus, translators will juste have to... translate the text whithout thinking about the layout. :-) For the news, we could use an auto-detection system in order to include the right translated news. Cheers, -- Grégoire.