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The New World Translation reads,

"No man has seen God at any time; the only-begotten god who is in the bosom [position] with the Father is the one that has explained him."

Sorry, the New World isn't a translation. This is a paid for hire job that was, in the process, mangled to cut out or change things that the Russellites don't find convenient to their doctrine.

As far as those variations in John 1:8 go, there are many different manuscripts. There are variations in the Greek. Some have one phrase, some have the other, some have a conflation of both. If there's no clear way (short of the fideistic declaration that the defective compilation known as the Textus Receptus is the only true Greek apparatus, which is laughable), the best that can be done is to offer all the variations for the reader to see. If you think that the differences in the translation between versions (that used different Greek texts) is because the translators couldn't figure out what the Greek was saying, then you need to do a bit of study on the matter. See Bruce Metzger's latest edition (4th) of The Text of the New Testament, Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Oxford University Press, 2005.

“The Text of the New Testament, Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration”

I don't have that book but i do have and have read Wallace's ‘Revisiting the Corruption of the New Testament’ and Metzger’s commentary on the Greek New Testament. Both quite informative.