What language is this, please?

It's Unicode Sparteye. The characters are from a webpage written in a common Asian language like Chinese or Japanese. Your web browser is set to read only 256-character ASCII (the alphabet - caps and lower case - number and special characters) which means that unicode (which incorporates ASCII Roman and Arabic symbols with Asian symbols) comes out on your screen as mostly gibberish. The only legible word amongst your sample is Yahoo! which is, of course, ASCII.

In order to read these characters as they were written you will need to either install a unicode web browser OR you will need to adjust your browser preferences accordingly to recognise them. However, not all browsers hav this option.

how do keyboards work in pictographic languages (Chinese & Japanese in particular)?

I'm no expert on Chinese but I did study Japanese for a while (thanks to a bilingual girlfriend). The Japanese words are combinations of short, sharp syllables. All Japanese children learn these syllables from an early age (as Western children do with the alphabet) so as to be familiar with the rhythm of the language. Only in later years do they progress to the difficult job of learning kanji and even Kanata. These phonetic sounds have an English equivalent name called Romaji

The syllabic sounds take the form similar to our vowel sounds so you would have 'words' such as ba, be , bi, bo, bu and kah, keh, kih, koh, kuh.

A combination of key strokes would be used for each of these sounds to produce the Romaji word and then finished with an escape character. The computer translates this word and the character appears as Kanji on the computer screen. It obviously requires the indiginous user to learn the characters of a Western keyboard but it does seem to be the simplest method at the moment.

I can only presume that the Chinese system is quite similar.

a little more... yes there are 256-character in ASCII -- and the chances are, you have 100, 101, or 103 key keyboard.

so it seems you should be able to use the keys to type out almost the complete character set.. but lets look at your keyboard.

at the right, a number pad, with some keys commonly use to express algabraic functions.. (0-9, +, -,*,/, a dot.) 17 keys is all.. and all of them are duplicated on the typewriter type board.

Moving to the right, and bottom, 4 directional keys, (these too are ascii characters, used to position the cursor..)
above 6 other keys, which are also postitional keys, but some of these are Ascii! --home is an ascii code!

and above them 3 more, print screen, scroll lock, and pause..

On the main keyboard, some of the keys are ascii.. Enter for example (Hard Carriage return..boy that tells you something about ascii--its reference point is a manual typewriter!) and shift while not a ascii key, is used to get codes.. so while A= ascii 65, (there are 26 letters in the alphabet, lower case a is not 65 + 26, but rather 65 + 32..(97!) On most keyboards, you hav 2 alt keys, 2 del keys, 2 control keys, 2 shift keys, and finally 12 function keys. Most of the function keys do not have a standard ascii code designation..

They result is, you there are about 65 keys that print visible available for ascii text codes. (and about 15 keys with ascii code, (space!, home, enter (carriage return), the cursor movement keys.. etc.)

The first 32 ascii codes are really hard to reprogram, the remaining 224 are reasonable easy to program. (create your own font! add ligatures!)about half of the Ascii first 32 ascii codes have keys on the keyboard. many of the first 32 ascii characters are not "visible".

in Japanese, (i don't know about chinese) there is a roman character code that uses the western characterset to spell out Japanese words (ie, Tokyo) some words, like the name Michiko,(one word in "western" characters, can in kanji, have different meaning. (2 different sets of Japanese kanji)(homophones, as it were) soft ware is suppose to notice these, (and so are proofreaders!) and offer two sets of Kanji.

reality is, it's difficult and slow, which is why computers and even typewriters are not nearly as popular in Japan as Fax's and copiers are! many documents are still hand writen, and copied, not typed or word processors.

for more on ascii, just google..

here is a table showing ascii with decimal values
http://www.jimprice.com/ascii-0-127.gif