Is there any way to turn the chat off?

I assume you're talking about the loudspeaker messages that scroll across the screen? The only control you have is whether or not they display in Kingdom Chat. You can't do anything about them scrolling across your screen apart from tapping the red 'x' to close them.

They can be annoying sometimes I agree, but they wouldn't be worth the 2,000 gold per message if everyone could just turn them off.

Hi just block them from chat then you don't see them