Documents for an Employment Pass or Dependant Pass
Pass applications arrive with a start date attached, which is why the translation question tends to surface as an urgent one. The documents involved are predictable, and so is the timing problem.
Qualifications, and the transcript behind them
Degree certificates are the obvious one. Transcripts are the one people forget, and they are usually longer, denser and more expensive to translate than the certificate they support.
Where a qualification was awarded in a system the reader does not know, the translation preserves the grading scale rather than converting it. Converting invites the question of who did the converting.
Family documents for a Dependant Pass
A dependant application turns on relationships, which means marriage certificates and birth certificates, and occasionally a divorce or death certificate where a previous marriage has to be accounted for.
These are the documents where names most often disagree across a set, so they benefit most from being translated together rather than separately.
The timing problem
Employers work to a start date. Universities and registries abroad work to their own pace, and obtaining an official transcript can take weeks. Translation is measured in working days, so it is almost never the bottleneck, but it cannot begin until the source document exists.
Order the underlying documents the day the offer is signed, and translate them as they land.
Check the requirement with MOM
What has to be submitted, and in what form, is set by MOM and changes. Take the list from them, then translate whatever on it is not in English.