As an example of the significant differences between the Novus Ordo text and the traditional ‘Tridentine’ Latin Mass, consider this, from Catholic Answers’ Karl Keating:

When changes were first made to the Mass, nearly forty years ago now, they were of two kinds. The most obvious was the switch from Latin to the vernacular. More subtle were changes in the underlying prayers. The text of the Mass was simplified in some ways, adjusted in others. While many prayers stayed the same, many were modified–and some even disappeared.

I never have met a layman who said that changing the prayers of the Mass was something that was high on his wish list in the 1960s, but I have met countless older laymen who liked the change from Latin to English. I suspect that had the old Mass simply been put into the English that was found on the facing pages of missals, very little of the subsequent liturgical turmoil would have occurred.

That English was not old-fashioned. It was a twentieth-century translation that did not use “thee” or “thou.” It was dignified but not stiffly formal. At times it even was poetic. It certainly surpassed the current translation. In the official Latin edition of the new Mass, many of the prayers are identical to those in the old Mass. It is instructive to compare their current translations to the ones found in the old missals. Sadly, often there is no comparison. It is as though in the space of a generation translators developed tin ears.

The best example of this, I think, is not actually from the prayers of the Mass itself but from one of the readings. Psalm 23 used to say that God “refreshes my soul.” Now he “revive[s] my drooping spirit.” Clunk….

I do not want to imply that the English that we now have in the Mass is everywhere inferior to the English that used to be found in the missals. That is almost universally the case, but only almost. There is at least one improvement. In the third Eucharist prayer the priest says, “From age to age you gather a people to yourself so that from east to west a perfect offering may be made to the glory of your name.” The central words are a revision of what used to be “from the rising of the sun to the setting thereof.” The older translation certainly seems more evocative, but I suspect in most people it evoked the wrong idea. The underlying Latin text is talking about a sacrifice that is made everywhere throughout the world. “From east to west” covers that. “From the rising of the sun to the setting thereof” also covers it — if you understand that the phrase is referring to geographical extent and not to the time of day….

No doubt the industrious can find other improved renderings in the current text of the Mass, but none come to my mind at the moment. In any case, the number cannot be large, which is one reason we are getting a better translation in a few years. (Yes, one is in the works–and has been for much longer than most of those working on it ever expected. Present indications are that the English will be improved considerably.)