unrecognized tag 'ts' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 583)

Hello,

When making a fresh install of the latest stable release of civiCRM on Drupal 5, I got a blank screen upon enabling the civicrm module in Drupal's module admin page.
I had to go to the DB to disable civicrm in order to see the error message which was:

user error: Smarty error: [in CRM/error.tpl line 18]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'ts' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 583) in drupal/contrib-modules/civicrm-1.6.8284/civicrm/packages/Smarty/Smarty.class.php on line 1095.

I went to the error template page, and removed all the

{ts}

...

{/ts}

tags.
Only this way could I get to see the error I was meant to see (in the civicrm config file, I had put 127.0.0.1 instead of localhost in the DB connection string).