Messaging in Mongolian
At first glance, it almost looked like the UD men’s basketball social media got hacked. Facebook posts and tweets suddenly started appearing in a foreign language, but it was all planned.
This year, UD basketball welcomed Mike Sharavjamts, a first-year from Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, and the team has been tweeting and posting on its social media channels in his native language, Mongolian.
Ryan Phillips ’16, assistant director of digital strategy and brand enhancement, said the effort started back when UD was trying to recruit Sharavjamts. On his official visit, Sharavjamts’ mother and brother came with him, and the recruiting department wanted his mom to be able to understand the recruiting presentation even though she couldn’t speak English. So, Phillips went to work translating all 60 slides of the recruiting presentation into Mongolian.
Once Sharavjamts committed to UD, he became the first NCAA Division I player from Mongolia. The team made a Facebook post in Mongolian welcoming him. It got some attention, but it wasn’t until Sharavjamts began starting for the Flyers that the idea really took off.
“The first-ever translation into Mongolian was at midnight and was more or less a spur of the moment thing like, ‘OK, let’s do this,’” said Phillips. “I had been wanting to do it for a while, but I had never really found the right time for it because Mongolia is 12 hours ahead of us. It was midnight here, so it was in the middle of the day for them.”
Phillips typed up a message welcoming Mongolian fans to Dayton basketball and thanking them for their support, translated it and then posted it that night.
“It blew up,” Phillips said. “I mean it blew up.”
Since that original post, Dayton’s Mongolian followers have only grown.
“The numbers tell us that the fan base is there,” said Phillips who shared that Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, is Dayton basketball’s top city on Facebook with nearly 32% of their followers located there.
“I think it’s really a testament to what basketball, and sports in general, can do,” Phillips shared. “It’s been awesome to experience and see the love that the Mongolian people have for the game of basketball and for Mike. It shows how big of a deal he is.”
“It’s been awesome to experience and see the love that the Mongolian people have for the game of basketball and for Mike.”
Phillips shared that the original translation process was done through multiple translation websites to ensure the translation would be as accurate as possible, but now the translation is done by either messaging a friend of the program (who is currently working on a documentary about Sharavjamts for a major Mongolian broadcasting company) or a member of the Mongolian Consulate who then translates the message into Mongolian.
The Flyers also celebrated Mongolian Day at their game Friday, Feb. 10, with many Mongolian representatives attending and a Mongolian contortionist act performing at halftime.
“This is just the first step in hopefully a bigger picture of something that we can do over the next couple years,” Phillips said about future plans, but for now, it seems Mongolia is simply excited to be a part of the UD Flyers’ fanbase.