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Old Latin translations of the OT used the LXX. Jerome, charged by Pope Damascus in 382 to come up with a definitive Latin version, translated the LXX into Latin. Later he became enamored of Hebrew and, in the last years of his work translating, translated the Masoretic text into Latin with results that were, in some places, radically different from the LXX. If you were to have to decide between Jerome, working five to seven centuries later, translating an ancient Hebrew text with his newly acquired understanding of Hebrew and seventy Jewish scholars translating their own language into the common language of the region (Greek) about who was more likely to get the translation right, you'd have to go with the Seventy. As my Greek teacher told us, when we asked him how learning Greek compared to learning Hebrew, "It's like falling off a log compared to Hebrew."

I'd give the benefit of doubt to Hebrew speakers who knew Greek to come up with a more adequate translation of Hebrew into their every day Greek language than a Latin speaker who only later in life had started to translate the Hebrew scriptures. The same could be said of Jerome and the Masoretic text what Augustine complained about Latin speakers and the Greek text: anyone who knows a little Latin and Greek thinks he can come up with a translation. The result was the proliferation of inadequate, disparate translations that led to Pope Damascus giving his secretary the task of preparing a new Latin version.

And the Vulgate prepared by Jerome was of variable quality: the Gospels were still mostly of Byzantine origin and lesser of Old Latin versions (a two year rush job). The epistles were marginally revised Old Latin versions that had more of an Alexandrian origin. And by that time Jerome was immersed in his project to translate the Masoretic text into Latin. And the process of corruption continued over the centuries with Jerome's Vulgate. There were developed about as many variants as there were places it was used. Finally, the Church declared a need for a new official version of the Vulgate and came up with two, the latter of which, the Clementine Vulgate, was said to possess the extraordinary ability to preserve everything wrong from the previous versions.