In the vast body of work with which the pastor-poet J.J.L. ten Kate delighted or annoyed his compatriots in the second half of the century – there seemed to be no middle ground – translation played an equally vast role. Ten Kate translated an unimaginable number of texts originally written in an unimaginable array of languages. An inventory yields the following list: Armenian, Danish, German, English, French, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latin, Old Frisian, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Spanish, Turkish, Swedish. Many of these translations were made via an intermediate language, usually German.