Magento – Magento 2 – how to load JS template from filesystem in jquery widget

For example, native Magento theme-frontend-blank\web\js\navigation-menu.js has such code:

$.widget('mage.navigationMenu', {
    options: {
    ...
        collapsableDropdownTemplate:
            '<script type="text/x-magento-template">' +
                '<li class="level0 level-top more parent">' +
                    '<div class="submenu">' +
                        '<ul><%= elems %></ul>' +
                    '</div>' +
                '</li>' +
            '</script>'

And then they do

        this.collapsableDropdown = $(
            mageTemplate(
                this.options.collapsableDropdownTemplate,
                {elems: this.elemsToCollapseClone}
            )
        );

Is it possible to do something like this

collapsableDropdownTemplate: getTemplate(some_relative_path_to_template) ?
instead of

        collapsableDropdownTemplate:
            '<script type="text/x-magento-template">' +
                '<li class="level0 level-top more parent">' +
                    '<div class="submenu">' +
                        '<ul><%= elems %></ul>' +
                    '</div>' +
                '</li>' +
            '</script>'

My template is a little bit bigger and I want to allow frontend developers to modify it.