How would you show a character speaking a different language that the readers can't understand?

[flashofaurora]

Character A and character B speak different languages. the readers are able to read character A's dialogue because she's the main character, and all of her words are in my main language English. but the readers and character A aren't supposed to be able to understand character B's dialogue. so what should I put in character B's speech bubbles? they're both fantasy languages by the way, and I don't want to spend time creating new languages lol.
I thought maybe random special characters, but that might look like swearing.
Maybe I'd write squiggly lines?
What would you do for character B?

[BoomerZ]

Old school comics used to put a < dialogue > and then an * at the bottom telling you what language is being spoken.

Edit: my bad, you don't want the reader to understand. In that case just google translate it to a little used language that you target audience won't know.

[NickRowler]

For my comic I just did scribbles.

Another thing I will do is put a bunch of ~~~~~ next to each other like here

[flashofaurora]

thanks!! that is super helpful

[TheLemmaLlama]

I usually reserve squiggles for inaudible dialogue instead of different languages.

If you're okay with putting a little more effort in but don't want make up a straight-up conlang, I'd either:

• come up with a general 'look' for how the fantasy language looks like when written down (which doesn't have to be intelligible in any way). You might need to do this anyway if you want to display written documents in the fantasy language in your comic later on

or

• write down what the dialogue sounds phonetically (which again, doesn't have to be intelligible, it can be something like 'Ef, ri alkrash breh undulle!', which doesn't mean anything in particular; I just strung some random syllables together XD)

Otherwise, if you just want to get it over with and put in minimal effort, I second 'google translate it to a little used language that you target audience won't know' :]

[AnonymousHouseCat]

I remember reading a manga a while ago where there is a demon and human character, and since the story is told from the demon's perspective, all of the human dialogue is written basically in zapf dingbats. This plus the other characters' reactions indicate that the human speech is unintelligible (the reactions might help to avoid confusing it with swearing?) There was another manga I read where alien speech looks kind of like heavily distorted kana, not spelling out any real words. That might give the impression that there are human sounds though. I like @TheLemmaLlama's suggestion of making up your own symbols or nonsense words that hint at the general sound of your fantasy language.

[fleurravenbooks]

maybe you can make text really distorted ?

[NickRowler]

Dragonball did have random symbols. Tho in the context of this page, the translation also appears in the bubbles.

[Lady_T_Musings]

Good options in here, another idea could be to change the font so that it stands out as other or using the winding symbols most fonts come with in the symbols tab of your font of choice.

[system]

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