Open
Overview of the issue
If you use the WooCommerce Import tool to import multilingual products and follow this with the WPML Export and Import tool to assign the correct language to the imported content, where hierarchical product categories are included in the import in the secondary languages the parent category may not be assigned to the correct language.
For example, the WC sample data includes the categories “Clothing>Accessories”. When imported both the “Clothing” and “Accessories” categories are created (as parent > child categories), but only the “Accessories” category is assigned to the product (the “Clothing” category is implicit, but not directly assigned).
A similar scenario in a multilingual context (e.g. the import file includes Spanish products, some of which have for categories “Ropas>Accesorios”) would result in all of the categories being created, but “Ropas” would wrongly be labelled as the default language (English in this example) even though its child category “Accesorios” would correctly be labelled as Spanish.
Workaround
Until we can update the WPML Export & Import plugin to cover this scenario it is necessary in the .csv file to have at least one product that uses the parent category.
You can either include some dummy product that the parent categories are assigned to which can be later deleted, or where you have a value of “Clothing>Accessories” for the category column, for at least one product you can also explicitly assign the parent, e.g. “Clothing,Clothing>Accessories”.