So I was doing a little gardening work, and listening to Hitler: The First 100 Days by the historian Peter Fritsche. It’s a decent listen if you can overlook the narrator’s laughably bad pronunciation of German names and quotations.
Anyway, the author tells us of a 1933 Nazi propaganda film. Hitlerjunge Quex, and it’s the sort of self-congratulatory material you’d expect in the spring of that year. Shown at one point is a campaign poster which translates into English as:
Go and drain the scandal-sump, Hitler is our Trump.
The key words rhyme in both languages. Obviously, the intended meaning was as a trump in a card game. But I have to admit I nearly did a flip-take on hearing that one.
The combo of “drain the scandal-sump” and “Hitler is our trump” seems a little too spot-on. It looks like the book was written in 2020-- could it have been a little bit of a revisionist translation? Maybe the German was more like “hitler is our winning hand” or “Hitler is our checkmate move” and the translator, cleverly I admit since he also had to come up with a rhyme, decided to translate it to ‘trump’.
The OP mentioned that the key words rhyme in both languages. Since English is, after all, a Germanic language, I think it’s safe to say that there was little, if any, “revisionist translation” happening.
Why not? Things that rhyme are translated from one language into another while still rhyming fairly often. It just takes a couple creative word choices to keep it rhyming while not changing the meaning too much. And ‘scandal-sump’ sounds like a bit of s stretch to rhyme with ‘trump’. To take my partial example above, here’s a translation into English that rhymes, means about the same thing, and does not have the word trump in it:
Go and drain the swampy land,
Hitler is our winning hand.
In German, the key words would be ‘Sumpf’ und ‘Trumpf’; I don’t know the original slogan, but if it featured any other words, it would at least be a tendentious translation.