Unstructured and Semistructured Interviewing

I found the articles that we read on interviewing practices to be very interesting and helpful in general. As a student who has done very little research and/or interviewing I can use all the help I can get. Mostly throughout these articles I was wondering if their advice would work in another country and another culture where the norms are completely different than that of our own. Obviously not all cultures have the same communication/body language signals and I think that that would be a big factor in conducting an interview.
For example, one of the suggestions was to probe in order to get more information out of the person you are interviewing without making them feel uncomfortable. One of the specific probes used was the "uh-huh" probe. However, not all cultures have that filler. In the US "uh-huh" means that you understand,for us it is implied that you are encouraged to continue because the listener understands. However, in other countries (even English-speaking countries) that might not be so. Now of course if you are conducting the interview in another language you shouldn't expect to be able to use this same phrase and get the same result; however, it is interesting to think that something like the word "uh-huh" generally is not found in a translation dictionary, yet it is something that has a lot of meaning and is used in daily language. So a big part of interviewing is figuring out communication cues and words/phrases that may not be taught in class or found in a dictionary. This kind of feels like a daunting task for someone who doesn't know a lot about where they are going. And this isn't exactly something that can be found in literature, it has to be experienced. Or especially the non-verbal responses, those are things that have great significance, but that you normally would not know had you never been to the country where you are going.
However, I did like the suggestions about helping people know that the information you are asking about will be kept confidential, earning their trust, etc. that can be used cross-culturally and is very good advice.