Representing Different Languages in Comic Format

Doing some pre-planning for my webcomic and I stumbled on a problem. Namely that I have a heavily diverse cast (I think the named characters hail from 10+ countries originally) and at some point I know someone is going to wind up speaking something that's not English. Even in a story set in the US, it doesn't make sense for the Spanish siblings or the Japanese couple to speak English to each other at home.

In a book, I'd just go with a bit of "she said in Arabic" at some point and have people follow along, but in a format where speech bubbles are the norm, I'm at a bit of a loss. The options, as I see them:

• Have all dialogue in the language it's spoken in. I don't want to do this because A. I do not speak all these languages, forcing me to either rely on google translate or find/pay someone to translate it for me and B. some of the dialogue will probably be important to the plot and I don't want people to have to be pentalingual or fuss around with the internet to figure out what's going on in my story

• Write all dialogue in English, but use different fonts/colored text/etc to indicate which language it's being spoke in. I've seen this done for online roleplays before, but I feel like it might be intrusive in a comic, not to mention that it requires some kind of guide or key at some point so people know what language goes with what.

• Don't do anything and let people figure out for themselves what's not being spoken in English when it's relevant. Not sure if I want to bank on readers being able to figure this out or no.

Any thoughts?

You could always Take a Fourth Option and do a mix of that third bullet and first bullet. That is, when the characters know what the other person is saying, translate it without comment. Then, when there's a mix of intelligibility, have one of the languages be translated and the other not and have the character who can't understand it react accordingly (however you feel that makes sense for your story).

Another option would be like in V Inland Saga. Here, the main character speaks [language A] but not [language B] and he gets separated and encounters a kind woman who speaks [language B]. While the characters are talking to one another, they're speaking in the "same narrative language" (like your third bullet above). But when the main character overhears what the woman is saying (she's speaking in [language B]), the artist drew squiggles in her dialogue box. This made it clear that she was speaking a different language but also that the main character could not understand her.

I've seen some webcomics use different fonts for each language, and others put the flag representing the nation of the language adjacent to the speech bubble.

I've seen some use square brackets or asterisks inside the speech balloons around "foreign language" bits rendered in English to enable the readers to comprehend what is said but visually indicate why the other characters, previously revealed to speak only English, can't comprehend what they're saying.

Thank you for the responses, guys!

@Waterblap- I like that idea from a theoretical standpoint, but I feel like it would get confusing. I feel like it's probably on the short list for what I'll go with if I can't come up with something better, though.

@Strontiumsun- Another solid idea, although I might have to take a look and see if I can make it fit into the tone of the comic. I feel like it could come off as goofy pretty fast if I did it wrong.

@Wolf 1066- yeah, that's a variant of the text color/font idea that could also potentially work

I believe that I've seen angled brackets used in webcomics (as with the square brackets above), along with an occasional asterisked footnote indicating the language being spoken, when called for.