CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

My guess is that contribution_type is available as a smarty variable already, and that soft credit contact name is NOT. First step is to verify this (on a test site!!!) by enabling Debugging, add the {debug} tag at the top of message template (telling smarty to spit out all it's available variables), and then trigger a receipt. If contribution type is available as a smarty var, you can just add it where you want it:

Contribution Type: {$contribution_type}

For soft credit contact, I think you'll have to define a new token (token hook) via a module. There's some posts on the forums if I recall covering adding tokens to receipts. If you get stuck, jump on IRC.