The R.I. members probably more likely to have been blessed by the cluestick fairy :)
Someone featured on last year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures was taking a more direct approach to interpreting what they meant. He was recording them and filming them to associate the sounds with the activities they were doing at the same time.
It's not along bow to draw to assume the topic of most communication between creatures involves their relationship with their environment and the entities in those surroundings, as well as their mutual relationships.
The article seems to indicate these researchers have identified the sonic structures that correspond do some type of linguistic atom or token in sperm whale communication.
Recording the whales prior, current and subsequent activities (behaviour) along with their sonic communication would be a reasonable starting point to try and correlate the combinations of whale Iinguistic atoms in exchanges between individuals with their behavior (past, present, future.)
Given the progress on Minoan Linear A, presumably a human natural language (not dolphin :), I don't imagine progress in whale translation is going to be very rapid. How would you get a handle on two old codger whales talking about the krill supply six months ago and a few thousand km away?
At least unlike the Minoans, these whales are still around (for the moment) to be consulted.