An analysis of what happened was circulated a few days ago and now published: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/TranslationNotifications_issues_2012-12 It's fairly technical but it's supposed to help improve for the future, although so far it wasn't acted upon: «TL;DR: Changes in MW core exposed a bug in TranslationNotifications. The same bug is also present in other extensions. Many people participated in preventing further damage and fixing the issue. More work remains to be done.»

We still don't know if the translation notifications should now work or what's going to happen to the job queue, nor how/if todays' jobqueue disaster (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/65703 ) may impact it.

Nemo