This paper explores how discourses on transnational matchmaking sites featuring so-called “Russian brides” are generated behind the online scenes: who partakes in the formation of these gendered and ethnicized presentations, how and why? In former Soviet Republics, matchmaking websites are mainly operated by marriage agencies, which strongly affect women's online representations. The data for this inquiry stem from long-term ethnography in one agency and qualitative inquiry in three other agencies in Russia. The chain of adaptations in self-presentations is assayed by collating letters that were originally written by female clients in Russian (a corpus of 2359 anonymized letters) with the English standardized online self-ads drafted by agency staff on the basis of these letters. By combining a corpus-based discourse analysis and ethnographic fieldwork, linguistic adaptations are linked to meso- and macro-level contextual variables. This inquiry provides new insights on how language is commodified in daily interaction to meet standards established by particular sites, and notably with global discourses on femininity and trust in online environments.