A time ago I started to work on a custom Drupal powered translation management system, unfortunately as I didn't have much spare time and actually there are really great alternatives (paid) out there - I decided to postpone this project.
Despite the project wasn't actively developed, it was though running a separate Linode VPS for it (which costs money), I decided to delete this instance to save money, but before that, I decided to keep at least one interesting feature I figured out - how to send e-mail to the assigned user (not user but node reference, in terms of Drupal) , after saving new project (node)
I had 2 content types - Translators and Projects, in the Projects content type I created a custom field ( field-assign-to) where with the help of node references I referenced username from Translators content type

Node Reference in Drupal 7
Learn more How To Reference Nodes in Drupal 8 + Views Relationships Display
Actually, a couple of years ago I was working on a similar assignment but less complex, see: Drupal Rules - How To Configure Journalist and Editor roles to Unpublish/Publish Content
Here I will paste plain Drupal 7 Rules export (working)
{ "rules_after_saving_new_project_send_email" : {
"LABEL" : "After saving new Project Send Email",
"PLUGIN" : "reaction rule",
"OWNER" : "rules",
"REQUIRES" : [ "rules" ],
"ON" : { "node_insert--projects" : { "bundle" : "projects" } },
"IF" : [
{ "entity_is_of_bundle" : {
"entity" : [ "node:field-assign-to" ],
"type" : "node",
"bundle" : { "value" : { "translators" : "translators" } }
}
}
],
"DO" : [
{ "mail" : {
"to" : [ "node:field-assign-to:field-e-mail" ],
"subject" : "[node:title]",
"message" : "[node:body]",
"language" : [ "" ]
}
}
]
}
}
Works for Drupal 7