Taking the relationship between the locality and globality of knowledge as its central analytical category, this study conducts a bibliometric and content analysis of papers on pragmatic translation studies published in seven Chinese and international translation journals between 2016 and 2025. The aim is to reveal the epistemological division between domestic and international research and to explore possible pathways for constructing an autonomous knowledge system in Chinese pragmatic translation studies. The findings show that Chinese and international pragmatic translation studies have shown a fundamental epistemological divergence within the knowledge ecology over the past decade. Chinese research is largely guided by a source-culture-oriented strategy, focusing on scientific and technical translation, external publicity translation, translation of classical texts, and historical studies of pragmatic translation, thereby reflecting a conscious effort to process and reconstruct China’s local knowledge into globally competitive knowledge. By contrast, international research tends to follow a target-culture-oriented strategy, concentrating on audiovisual translation, external publicity translation, professional interpreting, and translation management, which aims to localize and adapt universal knowledge or dominant knowledge and thereby sustain discursive authority. This divergence does not primarily reflect differences in research quality; rather, it stems from structural differences in the position of knowledge production (frontrunner/latecomer) and the modes of knowledge legitimation (globalization/localization). On this basis, the paper proposes three core propositions for pragmatic translation studies and a four-dimensional optimization pathway in response to four major weaknesses in current domestic research, namely knowledge conceptualization, arenas of knowledge legitimation, paradigms of knowledge argumentation, and mechanisms of knowledge transformation. The study ultimately argues that the fundamental mission of Chinese pragmatic translation studies is to elevate Chinese knowledge from translated local knowledge to world knowledge capable of participating in global knowledge competition.