em tag problem reffering to html validation.

Anybody meets with next code in forming html:
<em class="clear terms"></em> ? (there is empty tag em, that case warning at html validation).

I found some similar in includes/locale.inc

/**
 * List languages in search result table
 */
function _locale_string_language_list($translation) {
  $languages = locale_supported_languages(FALSE, TRUE);
  unset($languages['name']['en']);
  $output = '';
  foreach ($languages['name'] as $key => $value) {
    if (isset($translation[$key])) {
      $output .= ($translation[$key] != '') ? $key .' ' : "<em class=\"locale-untranslated\">$key</em> ";
    }
  }