Translate the sentence: 'Last week my brother got engaged, so I congratulated him.' and explain the various grammatical structures and processes you encountered while translating.

The correct translation should be: 'Letzte Woche hat sich mein Bruder verlobt, also habe ich ihm gratuliert.'The time phrase 'Letzte Woche' can remain at the beginning of the sentence as it is in English, with the auxiliary verb of the perfect tense, in this case hat from 'haben' must come as the second idea in the sentence. The verb for getting engaged in German is 'sich verloben', so the reflexive pronoun sich must come after the auxiliary but before the past participle in the perfect tense. The second part of the sentence after the comma requires normal word order again (verb as the 2nd idea, in this case the auxiliary of the perfect tense 'hat' again), with the past participle 'gratuliert' going to the end. The main grammatical stumbling point in this question is how to translate 'him'. 'Gratulieren' is a dative verb, meaning that the direct object of the verb, in this case the brother (him) must always be in the dative case. That is why the pronoun used is 'ihm', which is the dative personal pronoun meaning 'him'. Stylistically, this sentence can be improved by using the imperfect tense. The imperfect tense is used more commonly in writing, while the perfect tense is used mainly in speaking. If using the imperfect tense, then the sentence would translate as: 'Letzte Woche verlobte sich mein Bruder, also gratulierte ich ihm.'