Chinese classics carry traditional Chinese culture, including books and records, and gather the Chinese wisdom, values, and spirit that have been accumulated by the Chinese nation for thousands of years, which is an indispensable part of world civilization. As China becomes more involved in international political, economic, and cultural activities, the translation and external dissemination of Chinese cultural classics help deepen the international audience’s understanding and recognition of the mainstream values of Chinese culture and China's propositions in various international affairs. To represent the research focus and development trend of the “translation and introduction” and “external dissemination” of Chinese classics and to discuss the inherent connection between the translation and dissemination of Chinese classics, relevant literature collected from 2013--2023 was retrieved by the keyword “Chinese classics” in the advanced search interface of the Web of Science (WOS). The function of cluster analysis and the construction of the heatmap in the open-source statistical software R studio revealed that there was a mismatch in the research focus between the translation and external dissemination of Chinese classics. Translation focuses on philosophical research at the cross-cultural level, whereas dissemination focuses more on exploring the translation of works at the literary level.