Translate text on the front page with t()

Question

Have a multilingual site with English and French, I have all my static text on my page--front.tpl.php wrapped with a t(), cleaned my cache and refreshed the strings, but still i cant find the strings to translate them. I'm I doing something wrong here? example of code on page--front.tpl.php

<div class="class-example">
        <p><a href="node/add/poll" class="create-nav-dim cr-nav-bg mb10"><?php print t('Create New content'); ?></a></p>
        <h2 ><?php print t('OR'); ?></h2>
        <p><a href="#" class="example-class"><?php print t('check our content'); ?></a></p>
      </div>

Answer 1

You need to activate the locale module.

Under "Admin >> Configuration" you find a section regional and language.
Add a new language, and set it as default language; after that, you can use the 'translate interface' to translate the strings wrapped in t() for your new language.

Answer 2

After you've activated locale.module, you need to switch to another language and view the page in that language — until you do that, the strings to translate aren't added to the database.