I'm a WordPress developer with over 5 years of experience. I provide custom solutions: themes, plugins, and everything in-between. I have gone through the project description, and I can implement 3 changes:
1) Reduce the columns to 3 and make the third column a widget controlled area
2) Make 1st row of posts static
3) Implement a Google translate feature
Kindly provide your website url, I take a look.