I see no problem in the Sed command which evidently failed. If you
run the same command from the Bash prompt, does it work?

What makes you think that Sed failed? It runs fine from terminal. Furthermore, it says line 39, so it's this:

${EMACS} -batch -l "${srcdir}/uvs.el" \

--eval '(uvs-print-table-ivd "${srcdir}/IVD_Sequences.txt" "Adobe-Japan1")' \

> $@

what actually failed.