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In Lombardy, I often hear phrases like sono dietro a cercare qualcosa to mean sto cercando qualcosa.
Is that widely understood, or is there another way to translate the Present Progressive used in English?
To my hears, sono dietro a [infinitive] seems a literally translation of an Eastern Lombard phrase, but since there are Italian expressions like stare dietro a, andare dietro a, correre dietro a, I wonder if also essere dietro a is understood outside Lombardy.
It's used also in Veneto (son drio a fare/*so drio fare*, depending on the actual location), but it should be marked as dialectal and not standard Italian. I don't think such an idiom would be understood outside Northern Italy.
When I was in elementary school, I frequently heard hypercorrections such as sono dietro facendo. Our teachers always frowned upon usage of sono dietro a fare (and they were right).
No, "sono dietro a..." it's not a widely understood phrase. The correct Italian form is to use the verb "stare" followed by the gerund.
Furthermore the quite similar phrase "sono indietro a..." means a very different thing: "I'm behind in...", so I would not assume that people understand what you mean.
I'm from Trentino, Val di Non. In our dialect, called Nones, we also have that expression. It is actually the only way to form the gerund. E.g. son dria a far bergot - I'm doing something. Thus, I would assume that this is a characteristic shared with other northern Italian dialects too. In standard Italian, the one of the Accademia della Crusca, it is not accepted. It is a phenomenon of language contact between the two languages, as many northern Italians are bilingual in the two. Because in Italy, speaking differently from the imposed norm is socially looked down upon, I would reccomend you to learn the actual gerund e.g. sto facendo qualcosa. But linguistically speaking it is not incorrect if you use it when speaking with people that understand it (basically northern Italians). It is just a phenomenon of language contact, just as the ones that created other accepted features of the vulgar that later became what we know as Italian.
Non so, "sono dietro a cercare qualcosa", secondo me, esprime un senso di maggiore disperazione rispetto a "sto cercando qualcosa [qui dietro]"; come se nel primo caso la ricerca fosse affannosa, quasi un evento indesiderato.
Invece, "sto cercando qualcosa" esprime determinazione, quasi come se il "ricercatore" abbia precisa contezza della finalità e della utilità della sua azione.
Nevertheless, as far as I can tell, "essere/stare/correre/andare dietro" are commonly used, and understood, outside Lombardy, also in metaphorical sense.
The *sono dietro a fare..." locution, when not used to express where you're doing something (more explicitly sono dietro, a fare..., where the optional comma reveals the difference), is akin to the french form je suis en train de faire, meaning I'm doing that, right now.
User @GabrielePetronella's comment on another answer talks about I'm busy doing something as a possible translation. While I feel that is a really good translation for some uses of the Lombard locution, I feel the Lombard sentence has a wider meaning: I'm doing something, for which the correct form in Italian would be sto facendo. (Yes, this means the locution you found is just a literal translation.)
In Modena we use phrases like essere dietro a mangiare and sono dietro che mangio as the normal ways of expressing the standard sto mangiando. In the local dialect these same phrases represent the only ways of expressing the above notion.
:)