About Us
The Payment Practices™ online database is the successor to the original "grandfather" of all translation agency payment lists, the Payment Practices list (PP list) on Yahoo Groups. The Payment Practices list was started by Karin Adamczyk, a French-English freelance translator, on December 21, 1999. The Payment Practices list was the first service intended to provide freelance translators and interpreters with information about the payment practices of translation agencies and other clients for the growing global community of translation service providers.
The Payment Practices list was averaging 244 messages a month in 2001. Due to increased demands on her time from her business, Karin was no longer able to devote sufficient time to the list and she passed the moderator's baton to David Orpin, a well-respected agency owner and translator based in Germany, and Ted Wozniak, a German > English freelance translator in the USA, on November 27, 2001. David and Ted made some minor modifications to the format and rating system and jointly managed the list until David's untimely death on December 16, 2002. Ted then managed the list alone until its migration to the online database in 2007. Between 2001 and 2006, the number of list messages archived increased by more than 12,000 and the number of subscribers worldwide rose by more than 80% from 1,795 in January 2004 to more than 3,300 in February 2007.
From the outset of their stint as moderators in 2001, David and Ted had discussed moving Payment Practices to an online database, not only to reduce the time they were required to donate to run the list but, more importantly, to provide faster and better quality service to the translator community. But the demands of running a business and other constraints delayed work on that goal for several years. Finally, in 2006, the list had grown so much that it was decided that it had reached "critical mass" and moving to an online database was the only logical solution for providing this high-quality information rapidly and easily.
Payment Practices, Inc. was incorporated in September 2006 with the purpose of owning and running the Payment Practices database and to provide legal protection in the event of disputes (e.g. lawsuits for libel) arising from the information contained in the database and provided to subscribers. The Payment Practices™ database went online on June 12, 2007.
While Payment Practices, Inc. was not incorporated as a not-for-profit corporation, its primary purpose is not to make a profit but to provide a service to the freelance translator community.