It would operate a lot like image recognition tasks, probably in frequency 0 domain for a concrete space to operate in. SLID or other information theoretic approaches could isolate common signals, then translate that to captured environmental information (e.g prairie dogs identifying predators).

Animals don't use a known syntax per se, so it wouldn't be authentic translation, but a transliteration may be possible. Also, there is no guarantee that one animal doing something (like a dog's behavior for going to the bathroom) maps to many or all dogs.