Won't they need some documents that combine whale speech noises with human words to bridge the gap? Otherwise they are making comments that are just word-like or sound-like fragments.
I'm sure you've seen the example of word vectors that captures some of this meaning. king - man + woman = queen
In Spanish, rey - hombre + mujer = reina
The _relationship_ between "king" and "queen" in English may look close enough to the _relationship_ between "rey" and "reina" in Spanish, allowing you to bridge the gap between the two languages, even if they are entirely disconnected and you've never seen a direct translation between them.