Thierry is correct. Intern-soft is Emacs way to go from a string representation to the symbol itself (or nowhere, if there's no match). This is not new with shorthands.
Should we document this in the Elisp manual? Maybe, but where? Shorthand section? Not sure. This is a feature of Lisp in general and the correct way to go from strings to symbols. Before shorthands we got away without this step for obvious reasons. Curiously, I was pleasantly surprised that much code of key symbol processing facilities was already using this indirection and shorthands automatically worked in those facilities because of that.
João