Defining a different language than english as base traduction in tpl files

[Caroline Roy]

Hi everyone,

I'm currently working on a theme and I was wondering if you can setup a different language than the english one as default in translations and so, in tpl files.
To be a bit more clear, let's take a simple example : I have my product.tpl with some string to translate. {l s="My string in english d="Shop.bla.bla}. Everything is ok but, most of my clients have a french website and sometimes (when they have a multilingual website) they have to hire translators to define very domain specific text and terms and this come after my development.
What I'd like : it's that I could define all my strings in french in my tpl to be used as the "translation base" like {l s="My string in french etc}

That way I can work on my dev and then fill the translations once I have them.
Otherway, everytime I have an english content that has changed (after being translated by a real translator), I have to redefine all my strings in tpl file and then redefine the french content in translations (when french was correct since I have all content before dev) since I lose all at each modification.

I haven't found anything related to this in prestashop developer doc and was hoping maybe someone could lead me to a solution.

Thanks for reading this long post and thanks in advance for your response.
Have a nice day/evening