As children, the two brothers are in the back seat of a car when their parents, in the front seat, are pulverized by some kind of alien overpressure weapon. Which means that not only are they now orphans, and have seen their parents die horribly, they're coated in their parents' aerosolized blood and tissue.
There's a human translator with an earpiece who translates the aliens' click- and squeal-based language into English, but does not try to translate the humans' responses into the alien language. Possibly Justified in that the alien language sounds like humans couldn't reproduce it anyway.
