Exported products marked as duplicates

This thread is resolved. Here is a description of the problem and solution.

Problem:
After duplicating products and importing translated content via WP All Export and Google Sheets, the products still display as duplicates in the admin area with a message indicating they are maintained by WPML. This could potentially overwrite the translations if the original product is edited.
Solution:
This behavior is expected because WP All Export does not modify the post status in the postmeta table, which means imported products remain marked as duplicates. To resolve this, you can manually set each product to 'translate independently' by clicking the respective button in the WPML interface. Alternatively, you can attempt to remove the

_icl_lang_duplicate_of

keys using WP All Import, which might change their status to independent translations. Detailed steps for this process can be found here. Ensure you back up your site before making these changes.

If this solution does not apply to your situation, or if it seems outdated, we recommend opening a new support ticket. We also advise checking related known issues at https://wpml.org/known-issues/, verifying the version of the permanent fix, and confirming that you have installed the latest versions of themes and plugins. For further assistance, please visit our support forum.

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This topic is split from https://wpml.org/forums/topic/automatic-translation-overrides-manual-translation/

Tagged: Custom Work

This topic contains 4 replies, has 0 voices.

Last updated by bikbulatovaE 1 week, 4 days ago.

Assisted by: Laura.

Author	Posts
May 2, 2025 at 9:12 am #16988695
bikbulatovaE	Ok thanks for the help. I encountered a new minor issue that can lead to potential problems later. Could you please help fix this? I duplicated all my products > Export with WP All Export > Translate on Google Sheet > Import back the changes. The issue is that products are still displayed on the admin area as duplicates: "This document is a duplicate of Tactical groin pouch and it is maintained by WPML." I'm afraid that this can override all the work that was done. It seems that the content updates imported with WP All Import didn't trigger the "translated independently" status.
May 2, 2025 at 10:44 am #16989151
Laura WPML Supporter since 05/2018 Languages: English (English ) Italian (Italiano ) Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+02:00)	I'm afraid this is expected. Information about post status (duplicated or translated) is added to the postmeta table, and WP All Export doesn't touch it. I don't think there is a way to export this information. Therefore, when you import the info back, it's still a duplicate in the database. And yes, if you edit the original product, the translation will be overwritten because that's how duplicates are supposed to work. WPML doesn't have a way to bulk change duplicates into translations, so at this moment the only way to change it is to open the translation and click on "translate independently" button.
May 2, 2025 at 11:26 am #16989319
bikbulatovaE	It's not a solution, With +1.8k products in the store, I can't afford to do this manualy. Is it possible to triger this function along with wp all import, with custom code? Or meta field value? I need a fix/workaround for bulk modifications.
May 2, 2025 at 12:11 pm #16989491
Laura WPML Supporter since 05/2018 Languages: English (English ) Italian (Italiano ) Timezone: Europe/Rome (GMT+02:00)	You should ask WP All Import team if it's possible to retrieve this kind of data. Probably with custom code it's possible, but it's not something we can provide support for - beside being not covered by our Support Policy, WPML is not involved in your workflow except for adding language code. You can try removing the keys _icl_lang_duplicate_of as explained here but please do a full backup before attempting it.
May 3, 2025 at 12:13 pm #16991818
bikbulatovaE	Hi!! Thank you very much for giving me this meta data. It is very easy to deal with this: Update _icl_lang_duplicate_of with wp all import with blank data. However the WPML All Import plugin has to be installed and the correct language needs to be setup for the import to correctly work, and update the desired translated content.