We really need to get translations going again so people can contribute that way.
There's a few problems at the moment with the way we do translations. Launchpad doesn't have support for translations in Git repositories yet, and while Weblate did work for .desktop files where we always knew the location, with the Lubuntu Manual, the main problem was really that the content changes so much and we don't have a good way to scour the subdirectories natively in Weblate (that's how Weblate supports translations; per-directory, and you can't just set a "recursive" flag).
So we can either get the Weblate instance going again and task @lynorian with manually adding new chapters and such to be translated, as well as keeping on top of updating the translations and importing new ones, or we can find a different solution that works better for us in the long run.