Ip still vividly recalls filmmaker John Shum Kin-fun's account of watching Derek Yee Tung-sing's - which Shum produced - at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1988 with an audience comprised of mostly non-Chinese speakers.

Midway through Yee's crime drama - which has been described as the Hong Kong equivalent of Sidney Lumet's 1975 classic Shum was shocked to see the subtitle "I need Aids!" on screen for a line of dialogue that was more in line with a cry for help.

"Everyone in the audience laughed," Ip recalls Shum as saying. "But the scene was supposed to be a tense moment."

Although English is an official language in Hong Kong, much of the English subtitles in earlier Hong Kong cinema have been below par. Conversely, Chinese subtitles for foreign films are also hit and miss - on the mainland, the recently released has been criticised on social media for poorly translated subtitles.

"Even now, to some distributors or people in the film industry, subtitles aren't very important - it's just something that has to be done," Ip says. "Subtitles have never received the attention they deserve."

An acquisitions manager for local distributor Golden Scene, Felix Tsang has also written subtitles for 12 of the company's recent releases, including and . The work has made Tsang pay closer attention to subtitles, even when he's watching movies for fun.

Tsang remembers seeing mistakes or bad translations in the Chinese subtitles of major Hollywood movies, such as "ground zero" being translated very literally to "point zero" in the Chinese subtitles of , last year's zombie apocalypse flick starring Brad Pitt.

Tsang also recalls watching , Mami Sunada's documentary about Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki and other members of Studio Ghibli, and discovering that the film's Chinese subtitles were much more complex and poetic than the English ones.

"So let's say I'm just an English speaker and I can't read Chinese. Some of the film's emotions would have been lost [because of bad subtitles]," he says.

But even though the job isn't very well done, local film companies know it's essential for their films to have both Chinese and English subtitles.

In , the 1999 book about Hong Kong cinema, authors Lisa Oldham Stokes and Michael Hoover claimed that "British law after 1963 required that all films be subtitled in Chinese and English, but it didn't 'require that titles make sense.'"

But the Office for Film, Newspaper and Article Administration - which reviews all movies before they can be released in cinemas - says there is no such law requiring subtitles, although most of the movies they review do come with them.

Ip believes that local filmmakers have sought for decades to spread their work overseas, so putting English subtitles in their films was a no-brainer. Chinese subtitles, meanwhile, were included so that the films' audience would not be limited to just Cantonese speakers.

"That became a routine, but no one has ever considered writing subtitles to be a special skill," he says. In the past, there were companies responsible for putting subtitles onscreen in post-production. Many of these companies were family-run operations, and Ip remembers one, in particular, that relied on the owner's secondary school sons as main translator.

Teresa Wang Hing-suen, a lecturer in language and translation at the Open University of Hong Kong who used to write subtitles on the side, explains that it's not always the translators' fault.

"Once you've submitted the subtitles, it's like you've tossed it into a void and you have no idea what they'll do with your work," she says.

Wang recalls incidents where, after her subtitles had been handed over to the film production company, staffers there would edit the lines to fit on the screen without checking if the trimmed lines made sense.

It got to a point that Wang would dread watching movies she worked on with family and friends, knowing the badly butchered subtitles would be credited in her name.

More positively, Wang remembers filmmaker Peter Chan Ho-sun seeking her approval on edits made to her subtitles for the 2005 horror film , which Chan produced.

She was also given a rare amount of input and access when working on Andrew Lau Wai-keung and Alan Mak Siu-fai's (2002).

Asked to translate the screenplay and synopsis even before shooting of the film began, she found that it made the subtitling process easier.

"As I was involved from the very beginning, I was intimately familiar with the storyline and where they want to take it," she says. "If I had only got involved after the film was finished, I may not have been completely on the same page with the filmmakers."

That crime drama was later adapted by director Martin Scorsese into multiple Oscar winner . Wang believes that would not have happened if Western viewers hadn't seen the original film and understood it.

Another interesting subtitling yarn comes from Ip: in 1996 he was writing subtitles for the Robert Rodriguez action thriller and he was tasked with translating the name of a big-breasted character played by Salma Hayek.

"The character's name wouldn't mean anything if you just translated it phonetically," Ip recalls.

In a bid to better contextualise matters for the local audience, Ip says, he named Hayek's character after local actress Diana Pang Dan, who was known for her well-endowed chest.

Ip's joke caught on.

"Years later, when Salma Hayek became a movie star, local entertainment reporters here would call her 'Hollywood's Pang Dan'."

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