taxonomy search database import

this is a real scull scratcher for me.
I have been doing a database migration from an old mambo CMS.

Everything goes fine... the nodes get created in two languages, the relationships between translated nodes is preserverved, the mambo tags get transformed into drupal taxonomy terms.... all great.

But then...
For the content in spanish, I have to transform the terms into new spanish tags.

my process goes something like this.

I create the vocabularies
I create the english terms, including adding entries in the term_hierarchy that indicates a flat hierarchy