Difficult buyer – what should I do?

[willwriteforu]

Some days ago I get a message from someone wanting me to translate a rather short book. I explicitly asked for the precise number of words[!] in that book since they did not provide the file up front. They said that it’s about 2400 so I sent him a custom offer for the translation of 2400 words (the number is also indicated in the description of the offer and in the “what’s included” area) and they accept. 1 day before the deadline I start translating and I notice that there is a suspicious amount of text there. Of course, it’s a PDF so I can’t precisely get the word count from there so I just paste everything on to a word file – it says that there are more than 4100 words which includes the instances where words got pasted without spaces so multiples merged together count as one. Then I uploaded the PDF to an online word counter which said that there are more than 5400 words which is more likely because this program separated all of the words that had merged in Word. Bottom line: there is no way that there were only 2400 words in that text.
So I finish the translation of 2400 words because that is the amount we agreed on and what I am getting paid for.
Now that buyer is complaining about why I didn’t translate the whole book and is pestering me with revisions (so that I translate the whole 5k for the price of 2400) even when I politely and clearly told him about the misinformation that he provided me.
What do I do in this situation? I feel really bad for him but it is not my fault that he indicated a wrong number of words.

[uxreview]

In the future make sure you check the document as soon as you get it not 1 day before the deadline. That way you can discuss the word count with the buyer before you even start working on it. Right now you’ve spent time translating it and there’s a chance that you might not get paid for it. You should get paid, but if you read this forum then you’ll see that buyers often find ways to walk away without any penalty.

At this point what you can do is add an extra on top of the order or the buyer can make the second order for the remaining part with someone else if they want to. You should get paid for the 2400 and if they don’t like it then they can go to CS and explain why they didn’t read the description.

[aliimranns]

Hello!

Yes as freelancer sometime you have to cope with such clients those are not looking for a good worker … instead they focus on getting one time job done … Certainly! it’s not professional and the worst behavior from client… But now you are in this situation! … I would suggest you to be calm and try to get this project done with positive reviews … Yes i know it’s very difficult to pretend to be very friendly and polite with such client … but you have to get through it … Otherwise that client will try to ruin you profile with his negative reviews … And … if that client is totally crap … contact to Fiverr support and try to cancel this project without any inverse marks on your profile … and in future try to avoid such a looser!!! Hope you will be able to resolve this issue positively !!! Best of luck !!! 🙂