Jonathan Cohen wrote:
Considering the tight deadlines of the project and the significant time spent grappling with formatting and image issues, the translation perhaps didn't meet my usual high standards I strive for, some of their comments were justified.... I'm confident that I gave it my best given the circumstances and constraints I faced. I worked quite diligently on it, creating a lexicon for all terms (of which there were many, over 650 in total), and while the outcome may not have been perfect, it was the best output for me.
As far as I can see, you did as well as could have reasonably been done given the circumstances and tight deadline. OF COURSE there will be errors and imperfections if the deadline was set too tight. As far as I can see, the error was with the client who did not set up an adequate work flow, and now they are trying to bully you to believe the errors they've found were your fault.
If I ask the pizzaman to make me a pizza but to not spend more than 1 minute to prepare it and only bake it for a few minutes in the oven, can I then complain about the quality of the pizza when I receive it (for instance that it's undercooked and only has tomato on it) and will it be reasonable of me to ask for a refund in that case? Can I complain that he didn't make the pizza properly?
Besides asking to see the changes, as other have suggested, I think you need to explain to the client that the imperfections are perfectly normal given the circumstances and that they need to be prepared to organize their work flow differently next time if they want to ensure higher levels of quality, and you should give them a set of constructive suggestions in that regard (e.g. longer time frame, better reference documents, opportunities to get feedback/answers from the end client, review by a second linguist, and perhaps they should also consider using another translator if they need one with special competence in a particular field etc.).