If I remember right, the Catholic Church came out with a new revised bible translation sometime in the 1960s. It was done mainly for better readability in modern day languages. Was it called New Jerusalem or some such?
When I went to the overseer school in 1970, Al Schroeder (one of the instructors) was very enthusiastic about it. There seemed to be quite a lot of hatred for the conventional Catholic Bible that preceeded it. I noticed (and Ed Dunlap confirmed it) that the higher ups of Witness leadership harbored a great deal of animosity for the Catholic Church. He made the ironic comment that many things the witnesses did were in fact very like the Catholics.
They also used to have a very nice interlinear translation of the NT called Emphatic Diaglot. The story went that Freddy was not happy with it because of embarrasing conflicts with his precious NWT - so they refigured it into the Kingdom Interlinear Translation and stopped publishing the original. The rights to the original had been given to the Society by the widow of its non-witness author - she thought that the really were a fair and decent bible publishing society!