This article explores translanguaging practices and the different communicative functions achieved through these practices in two residential elderly care facilities in Sweden. Translanguaging here is used as an overarching term for multilingual practices that encompass translation practices, code-switching across linguistic and cultural boundaries, and embodied modes of communication. The data consist of video- and audio-recordings of interactions in two care encounters involving two migrant-background residents, two care workers and a physiotherapist. The analysis focuses on the communicative practices enacted by the care workers who go between and beyond different languages in order to create social spaces where they can accomplish care tasks and manage relational work. These findings highlight the transformative potential of translanguaging to create new configurations of communicative practices, here understood as a change in the care workers’ flexibility to mobilize a broad repertoire of linguistic resources that involves functionally integrated use of different languages and modalities (speech and gestures). At the same time, the functional use of translanguaging practices is contingent on the availability of a translator, and on the linguistic and cultural sensitivity of the care workers