Don't block the site totally and it will not matter really. A lot of people in the e-commerce world do it like in this demo, http://warehouse.iqit-commerce.com/selector/?theme=warehouse2  Just a small bar on the bottom of the page. If you wanted to get even more clever, you could geographically target the user and show based on that and exclude bots from seeing it. But I would not suggest blocking the whole page like an adult site does if it is for cookies. If it is an adult site, that needs a full disabling disclaimer, I have no experience in that area.

Don't translate proper names. Especially things like New York, I would be willing to bet that everyone has heard of that. But I take the stance to not translate proper nouns, it dilutes the word and causes confusion.

If you are running Wordpress also check what page / pages are being accessed. I have had bots nail my wp-login like that before. If that is the case harden your installation, one thing I have found that stopped it was setting a deny in the htaccess on wp-login / wp-admin.

I would, personally I have disabled my tag page and author page since there are no tags, and only one author. As for the categories I have them no-indexed.

Hmm, I honestly do not know in this situation. One thing you might try is to do a modal that blocks the page with a semi transparent layer, but check if it is googlebot accessing the site and not do a modal.

But honestly, I thought it was a cookies thing being in the EU so I am not an expert in this area.

What is your opinion of doing everything you said but, skipping the no-index and pointing the canonical at the original publishers site?