diff --git a/nemo/collections/nlp/models/machine_translation/mt_enc_dec_model.py b/nemo/collections/nlp/models/machine_translation/mt_enc_dec_model.py
index 4133d596c44b..4ae12f79c59e 100644
--- a/nemo/collections/nlp/models/machine_translation/mt_enc_dec_model.py
+++ b/nemo/collections/nlp/models/machine_translation/mt_enc_dec_model.py
@@ -403,6 +403,9 @@ def validation_step(self, batch, batch_idx, dataloader_idx=0):
 
     def eval_epoch_end(self, outputs, mode, global_rank):
         # if user specifies one validation dataloader, then PTL reverts to giving a list of dictionary instead of a list of list of dictionary
+        if not outputs:
+            return
+
         if isinstance(outputs[0], dict):
             outputs = [outputs]