  This paper studies Heegaard splittings of surface bundles via the curve
complex of the fibre. The translation distance of the monodromy is the smallest
distance it moves any vertex of the curve complex. We prove that the
translation distance is bounded above in terms of the genus of any strongly
irreducible Heegaard splitting. As a consequence, if a splitting surface has
small genus compared to the translation distance of the monodromy, the
splitting is standard.
