: Re: Managing alien languages in Sci-Fi creatively I’m writing a story where alien races are in constant communication with humans, but I don’t want it to be awkward or have to use language tags

@Candy753

I think there are two parts to this: how the languages work in universe, and how you represent that out of universe.
By "in universe", I mean what is the fictional explanation for how these characters are communicating. This is part of your world-building, and unless communication is the key theme of your story, you may work out much more about it than you ever tell the reader - resist the temptation to include an "info-dump"! As other answers have suggested, there are lots of ways this might work:

The aliens studied human communication and greeted us in English, or Esperanto
Humans studied alien communication, and did the equivalent
A trade creole developed during first contact, and became the lingua franca
Telepathy
Machine translation
Simultaneous translation by trained interpreters (as is used in real-life in places like the EU and UN)

Having thought about that, you can then decide on a convention out of universe, i.e. how are you going to represent this to the reader.
If everyone is actually speaking the same language, just represent that in English. Similarly, if all the characters in a particular scene speak the same language, you might not bother mentioning if it's English or Betelgeusian or Tradelingua, because it doesn't make any difference. What you need to mention is characters in mixed groups slipping into a different language, either deliberately to talk behind someone's back, or accidentally in a stressful situation.
If you have regular sections where people are talking and not understanding one another, you can have a convention for marking the different languages. This is often done by varying the punctuation (e.g. using brackets rather than quotes) or typography (e.g. using italics or a different typeface). You need to explain what's going on sometimes, but the difference reminds the reader that there are two sets of people "talking past each other".
Some of the in-universe explanations also have consequences that would crop up regularly - delays in translation, or struggling to find the right word. Mentioning those occasionally can enrich the world for the reader (the classic advice of "show don't tell").
An interesting example is ''A Fire Upon the Deep'' by Vernor Vinge: between chapters, there is "flavour text" (not essential to the plot) in the form of messages which have been sent through a kind of interstellar internet. Each message includes a "translation path" of the languages it's been translated through to get to whatever language we're supposedly reading it in, and the text becomes more garbled as the source languages become further removed.

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