To what extent should the translation respect the grammar?

[Koen G]

I had been giving this some more thought, and actually this string of words could be made grammatically sound in English, and indeed a proper sentence. For that, we need to assume that the object "them" has been fronted. This would be called a "marked" word order. The unmarked word order would be something like:

"And, as no one called, they turn to them".

If you want to stress the "them", you can move it to the front, out of its neutral position: "And them, as no one called, they turn to".

So I think it is probably grammatical, although it still sounds weird, especially in isolation and with Ruby's punctuation.