Animate 1 object with 5 bones? Or use translate on 5 objects?

Hey,

I was curious if the performance overhead was more or less the same if I was to animate 1 object with 5 bones or use translate with 1 parent and 4 child objects? I'm currently using translate, which works fine, but I do have the 4 extra game objects this way and this is the player object, so, although it does simple movement, it is constantly moving.

Anybody have any ideas?

Thanks in advance