2009, Luca Barra, “The mediation is the message: Italian regionalization of US TV series as co-creational work”, in International journal of cultural studies[1], volume 12, number 5, Sage Publications, →DOI, →ISSN, pages 509–525:
It is important to note that – to partially avoid ethical and legal problems – on the websites only the textual files with the translated subtitles are released, the so-called soft subs
2010, Teemu Mäntylä, Piracy or productivity; unlawful practices in anime fansubbing[2], Aalto University:
Many groups continue to produce AVI encodes with hard subs though, and other groups offer two versions, one modern using MKV and H.264 with soft subs, and another legacy version using AVI and Xvid with hard subs.
2015 January 12, S. Massidda, Audiovisual Translation in the Digital Age: The Italian Fansubbing Phenomenon (Language & Linguistics Collection)[3], Springer, →ISBN, →LCCN, →OCLC:
Soft subs, unlike hard subs, (which are simple text files encoded in the video stream of a TV program), are .srt files which are separate from the video clip […] and loaded by users onto video players
