Probably Off Topic, but the KJV was an attempt to NOT do that and was direct from the original documents to English. The ones you buy now are also updated with the texts found in the dead sea scrolls and stuff. It's a very accurate English translation (and if you want slightly more modern language you can get a NKJV). It's them there Catholic translations that have the compounding error problem.
Which Catholic translations? One of KJVās sources is the Vulgate (JV) which is the basis for Catholic English Bibles (CEB). The Douay-Rheims (DRB) even used the KJV for its major revision.
There are newer CEBs that are based less on JV and more on the Masoretic Text (āHebrewā bible in medieval Hebrew, MT) and Nestle-Aland New Testament (what āscholarsā believe to be the original text but not actually the original text, NA), with heavy corrections from the Septuagint (LXX), Byzantine texts (Byz.), and JV. Byz. lines up very closely with the KJVās NT source āTextus Receptusā (essentially a critical edit of Byzantine sources into a single manuscript, TR).
Different CEBs rely on different amounts of JV, but even the DRB is not just a straight Vulgate translation anymore. CEBs acknowledge that St. Jerome either made mistakes or used words and idioms that donāt apply today and so have been corrected either by an old Protestant school of thought (traditional sources: LXX, Byz.) or new Protestant school of thought (Jewish sources: MT, NA). There is a rift in the Catholic about which school is better and that exact same rift exists in Protestantism and even in the Orthodox churches to a lesser extent (they are pretty much in agreement that (N)KJV NT+English LXX is best).
Are you thinking of the NIV and related which are based on MT (but still not solely, because the MT has too many problems to be translated directly; but NIV relies on just about every source possible before settling for the LXX; it is an anti-LXX translation) for OT and NA (with footnotes regarding missing verses) for NT? Because that line is quite different from KJV because the sources are substantially different from each other. Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS) favors LXX readings over MR in many places and there is still a lot of controversy because of that. It essentially proved a century of biblical scholarship as wrong but they still havenāt admitted to it yet.
So I would not say CEBs have anything to do with muddying translation. JV is hardly used as a source for any CEB, with even the DRB revised with the KJV (and the DRB is hardly used). So you donāt have a compounded Hebrew/Greek -> Latin -> English problem, and keep in mind that the KJV itself was influenced by the Vulgate, and there are instances in the KJV which are Hebrew/Greek -> Latin -> English, the most famous of which is the verse where we get the name Lucifer. The most you can say about CEBs is that they editorially inject Catholic traditions where they donāt exist in the source text. This may be possible, but that would be editorialization, akin to what Jehovahās Witnesses did with their bible, and has nothing to do with compounding errors from translation.
What has been far more problematic is the favoring of MT and NA over LXX and Byz./TR. For one, MT isnāt even able to be translated to English directly, unlike LXX, and NA is favored because the sources for NA are āolderā. And yet MT is much younger than LXX. Supposedly thatās because it is in āHebrewā but itās not even the original Hebrew the books were supposedly written in. Itās like if Shakespeare was translated very well into French, and then an hundred years later, very poorly into more modern English, and the latter was used as the basis for translations into Japanese instead of the French one.
99% of peopleās issues with different bible translations can be rooted to the differences caused by suddenly favoring different sources from tradition. Itās a miracle the NKJV used the same sources as the original KJV (plus DSS).