Before the new century, the translation and usage of representation, characterization and presentation in Chinese used to be clearly distinguished. After the recent rise of Cultural Studies in China, “characterization” has been used in all occasions instead of “representation”, in order to emphasize its function of “revealing symbols of the power struggle in culture” in the text. While this replacement is justified and the effort is necessary, the very mechanism of representation, which is the fundamental feature of a text, is suspended or even canceled as a result. This paper re-emphasizes the distinction between "representation" and "characterization" to put an end to such unnecessary confusions.