Can you "dumb down" ES6 template strings to normal strings?

Question

I have to work around the limitation of gettext to recognise ES6 template strings, and I thought about getting the "non interpolated value" of the template strings as a compilation step, in order to have only "normal" strings in the code.

Basically what I would like to achieve is transform this

const adjective = 'wonderful'
const something = `Look, I am a ${adjective} string`

console.log(something)
> "Look, I am a wonderful string"

into this

const adjective = 'wonderful'
const something = 'Look, I am a ${adjective} string'

console.log(something)
> "Look, I am a ${adjective} string"

One brutal way of achieving this is using sed, but it's most certainly not the more elegant (and probably also error prone)

sed "s/\`/'/g" FILENAME

Any better and cleaner idea comes to mind?