Student ability, teacher expectations, respective degrees of difficulty, and curriculum and instructional practices all work together to provide students experiences leading to differing levels of success in respect to mathematical translations. Herein, we discuss teacher beliefs and instructional practices, investigate why some translations seem to be more difficult than others, and provide instructional recommendations to assist students and teachers with mathematical translations. Through formal and informal observations of high school Algebra and Pre-Calculus teachers and students, possible links of causality have been observed to explain students' difficulties in translating among mathematical representations (verbal, symbolic (or algebraic), tabular (or numeric) and graphical). Affecting students' success are dimensions including: teachers' expectations of students being able to perform these translations; what teachers directly instruct and model in the classroom regarding translations; the complexity of some of these translations; and the level of the mathematics depicted in some of the representations. These dimensions and roles as causal factors in students translating from one representation to another are discussed in this paper. (Contains 7 figures.)