Joanna Dornbierer-Stuart

Joanna Dornbierer-Stuart is a UK-born language teacher, professional translator and author based in Switzerland. With a lifelong passion for languages, she earned a BA in French, Spanish and Linguistics from the University of Nottingham. Shortly after, she moved to the German-speaking region of Switzerland to teach English, where she encountered the unique spoken dialect of Swiss German. This sparked the research that culminated in her first book, A Complete Grammar Guide to Swiss German, published in 2020.

In 2011, she qualified as a German-to-English translator and has been a full member of the Chartered Institute of Linguists since 2012, allowing her to maintain close ties with developments in both language teaching and translation.

She recently completed an MA in English Linguistics at Birmingham City University, enabling her to develop her skills in the research process as well as refine her academic writing skills. This led to the publication of The Origins of Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Her latest release, Swiss German Vocabulary and Idioms (August 2025), serves as a sequel to her first book on Swiss German and continues her exploration of this distinctive dialect.

She is now preparing to begin doctoral studies in linguistics at Birmingham City University, where her research will focus on evaluating the present-day quality of machine translation output in the high-stakes field of legal discourse.